I, Technophile

Reviewing "What Technology Wants"

2011-11-07T20:21:00.000+10:30

It was both eminently appropriate and singularly poetic that the first full eBook that I would read would be Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants.

I had been holding off on getting into eBooks for a number of reasons, which included the fact that my book reading had declined in recent years (at the expense of a massive increase in web-based reading) and that I had concerns with being locked into a proprietary format (I wanted to be sure that no matter what format I went with it would be portable, accessible, and supportable in the future, regardless of what happened to the proprietor). Once I was comfortable that this wouldn't be an issue, I went with the Kindle format - specifically the Kindle Android App, which I read on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet, and had no trouble reading in this fashion for hours on end.

What Technology Wants is concerned with, and analyses, the technium - a term coined by Kelly to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us, a system that often seems to behave like a primitive organism. The technium is further captured in the following passage:

"Each new invention requires the viability of previous inventions to keep going. There is no communication between machines without extruded copper nerves of electricity. There is no electricity without mining veins of coal or uranium, or damming rivers, or even mining precious metals to make solar panels. There is no metabolism of factories without the circulation of vehicles. No hammers without saws to cut the handles; no handles without hammers to pound the saw blades. This global-scale, circular, interconnected network of systems, subsystems, machines, pipes, roads, wires, conveyor belts, automobiles, servers and routers, codes, calculators, sensors, archives, activators, collective memory, and power generators - this whole grand contraption of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a single system."

To see where technology is going and what technology wants, Kelly starts at the beginning, with the first crude stone tools of our ancestors some 2.5 million years ago and the crucial, singular development 50,000 years ago of complex language and the emergence of our species' ability to innovate. The subsequent story of how this development sparked the rapid spread of our species and our domination of the planet is both fascinating and engaging; a rise to eminence that was facilitated by language and its ever-evolving offspring - technology. From the spread of agriculture 10,000 years ago to the Renaissance the technium has evolved and developed at a quicker and quicker rate and never as fast as the blistering pace of today.

Kelly goes on to liken the technium as a whole as the 7th Kingdom of Life and indeed draws parallels between similarities in the evolution of genetic life and of technology. One of the notable differences is that combinatorial evolution is paramount in the case of technology. It is these combinations of technology that are like mating in an evolutionary sense, producing a tree of ancestral technologies and seeming to parallel the passage of time with a rise in complexity, a rise in order, and increasing interconnections at one level giving rise to higher levels of organisation above it. One of the key insights in this section (and there are many) is:

"The invention of language marks the last major transformation in the natural world and also the first transformation in the manufactured world. Words, ideas, and concepts are the most complex things social animals (like us) make, and also the simplest foundation for any type of technology. Thus language bridges the two sequences of major transitions and unites them into one continuous sequence, so that natural evolution flows into technological evolution."

From explaining how matter in a computer chip is more energetic than that in the core of a star, to the continued expansion of the Universe leading to an ever-greater energy-well down which entropy can flow and exotropy can rise, from arguing the on-going positive development and evolution of technological progress over time, to the organic growth of cities as our civilisation's largest technological artefacts, What Technology Wants flits from one fascinating topic to another with a breadth of scope that leaves the technologically-inclined reader hungering for more.

Other concepts that are covered include convergence in both the biological and technological sense, in which different threads of development often converge on the same form or solution and the subsequent arrival of certain biological and technological structures and forms seems inevitable. Kelly uses these and other points to ultimately argue that technology wants what life wants, and that this equates to ever-greater amounts of efficiency, opportunity, emergence, complexity, diversity, specialisation, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure, and evolvability.

While Kelly devotes a section to exploring each of these wants in turn, the one that sticks in my mind more than others is: Ubiquity. When a technology becomes ubiquitous it successfully permeates every aspect of the technium and human civilisation, and yet it simultaneously becomes invisible, taken for granted, and responsible for significant change in our lives. The example given is electric motors, which are all around us yet hidden, reliably doing our bidding at the flick of a switch. The fun game to play is to extrapolate from this example and pose the question of ubiquity on other technologies that are around today. Digital cameras are common today, but what happens when they become truly ubiquitous? Wireless internet is common today, but what happens when it becomes truly ubiquitous? Solar panels are common today, but what happens when they become truly ubiquitous? And so on.

I'll finish this review mentioning the one thing that puzzled me. One of the main themes throughout What Technology Wants is the nature of the technium and the many comparisons with our biosphere in how it evolves over time and how the entire artifice sprang from, and is still dependent on, human minds and ideas. How ideas spread from mind to mind, undergoing novel recombinations, birthing new technologies that cause the embodied ideas to jump back into new brains to continue the process. Not to mention the primary importance of the birth of human language in kick-starting the whole thing. And yet the word "meme" is mentioned only twice in the book and gets no special attention, despite being intimately tied to all the many threads throughout. I suspect this was by design by Kelly, yet I do not know why such treatment, which I would consider very relevant, was omitted.

All in all this is a great book in my opinion, broad in scope yet cohesive in message. What Technology Wants is a work that I look forward to revisiting and rereading in future.

What Technology Wants

You; The Collective

2011-09-27T13:55:00.001+09:30

Ponder for a moment just one of your cells before you were birthed. One among swarming billions. This little cell works day and night, toiling forsomething, some entity beyond its grasp or comprehension. Yet this cell and all others work together towards the same incomprehensible goal, the creation and maintenance of something far grander than sum of all the cells, something able to experience heretofore unfathomable areas of existence; You.

And yet, You are actually not so different as you go about your work, your life, your play, just one among swarming billions, toiling away with everyone else towards the birthing of something far grander than the sum of your collective efforts. While hazy awareness of this something has dawned on a lucky few, this entity remains incomprehensible to all as it seems to yearn from pre-birth oblivion to experience presently unfathomable areas of existence.

Fear not, for you will still exist when it wakes up, cell in a body, cog in a machine, bit in a thought.

image from heidesigners.com

Battling the Information Flood: On Searching for Knowledge and Utility

2011-09-07T22:56:00.000+09:30

Google Reader tells me that from my subscriptions over the last 18 or so months I have read about 56,000 items - or articles. A look at my typical browser history and some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that I'm approaching 100,000 page views per year; that's me, viewing nearly 100,000 web pages per year. Put a different way I'm viewing a different web page every 5 minutes on average . . . every day of the year. Just how much information is it possible to shove through one person's eyes?

This is what it means to be an informavore.

I feel the cold, mesmerising flood of information keenly, and the regular frustrations with trying to find time just to think in order to make adequate sense of it all. To do something useful and productive with the tidbits of knowledge I acquire and more importantly the ideas that such knowledge synthesises in my mind. I desire to set these ideas free, conceived of the world, to be birthed back into the world to have their chance at life, their chance to find a welcoming berth in brains other than mine. It is perhaps a shame that so many of them might be stillborn.

Much of my web surfing and indeed most of my Google Reader activity is focused around new science and technology developments of various sorts. I am at heart a Transhumanist and this is the sort of stuff that I am into, the sort of news I like to read about, the sort of things that really get my creative juices flowing. These new technology developments are typically focused around Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics (GNR) or, if you prefer, Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Infotechnology, and Cognotechnology (NBIC) - both of which include Artificial Intelligence (AI).

One of the consistent trends I have felt over the past couple of years is that the huge increase in on-line information consumption seems to parallel the accelerating pace of these technology developments. I really do feel that the Curve is Steepening. Of these developments that I follow, I bookmark the most important (in my opinion) for later reference. To give you an idea of the sorts of things that were announced, in just the last week, I present the following list (feel free to skim through):

Graphene was only the beginning; now MAX phases get two-dimensional as well - Materials engineering advance with possible advanced energy storage applications.
Controlling cells' environments: a step toward building much-needed tissues and organs - Biomaterials engineering advance with applications in stem cell differentiation for growing organs and tissues.
Down on the Farm, Will Robots Replace Immigrant Labour? - Discussion on recent developments in robotics-enabled automation in the agricultural sector.
Transforming Shipping Containers into Local Farms - Urban agriculture and innovation to enable high-density agriculture in general.
DMB Energy's Lithium Metal Polymer reported to cost 9 times less - Battery-powered electric car with a range of 450km on a single charge.
Novel alloy could produce hydrogen fuel from sunlight - Modelling new materials that if developed would efficiently use sunlight to split water to make hydrogen fuel.
World's first polyurethane blade reinforced with carbon nanotubes is lighter and stronger and 8 times tougher - Materials engineering advance with a wide range of possible applications.
Graphene goes plasmonic and could increase Internet communication speeds by 10 times to 10 gigabits per second - Materials engineering advance with applications in improving photovoltaics and telecommunications.
Anticancer Virus Showing Promise - Engineered virus injected into blood to selectively target cancer cells throughout the body.
Meat without Slaughter: 6 Months Until Artifical (in vitro) Sausage - Advances in growing meat in the laboratory, or test tube, from muscle stem cells and other materials that will drastically alter how we obtain our meat.
Randal Koene on Substrate-Independent Minds - Robust expert discussion on advances in the fields of artificial intelligence, brain mapping, and related areas, and the promise of future developments to enable full human mind uploading to non-biological substrates.
Transceivers to Conquer the Terahertz Frontier - New advances to enable full control and utilisation of the Terahertz band of electromagnetic radiation, lying between microwaves and infra-red, for imaging, security, and sensing.
Mixing Old and Young Blood is Informative - Donating the blood from a young animal to an old animal appears to cause the neurons (and other systems?) in the old animal to behave in a younger, rejuvenated, more robust manner.
GPU Minisupercomputers; 13.5 teraflops for $99K - Continuing advancements in the price-performance of computers.
Adding Hydrogen Triples Graphene Transistor Performance - Getting closer to graphene electronics and computer processors.
Japanese Researchers Make Tissue Transparent - New techniques to make the tissue of embryos and organs transparent to aid in imaging applications.
Full Coherent Control of Nuclear Spins in an Optically Pumped Single Quantum Dot - Advancing spintronics and possible quantum computer applications.
Discovery by Researchers could Create Retinas from Hydrogels - Biomaterials advance to assist in the creation of scaffolds for artificial tissues and organs.
Sony Announces 3D 720p OLED-Based Head Mounted Display - Advances in display technology for augmented and virtual reality applications.
Mechanical Energy Scavenging from Flying Insects - Materials for siphoning energy from insect wingbeats to power transmitters, sensors, cameras, receivers. Development to further turn insects into remote sensing / surveilance drones.
Dutch PlantLab Revolutionises Farming: No Sunlight, No Windows, Less Water, Better Food - Developments of intensive agriculture technology and "super-hydroponics" for vertical and high density urban farming applications.
Prieto Battery Claims Price Breakthrough and Extraordinary Power Density - Materials engineering developments to create better batteries and portable power applications.
Ultrasensitive Particles Offer New Way to Find Cancer - Better and more sensitive cancer diagnostic tests and molecular sensors.
Study Matches Brain Scans with Topics of Thoughts - Advances for better brain scanning and mind reading of people.
Flash Memory That'll Keep on Shrinking - Prototypes of, once again, graphene enabled flash memory units that will continue to shrink and improve memory devices.
Yale Scientists Find Stem Cells That Tell Hair It's Time to Grow - Developments to identify molecules and signals to switch on hair stem cells for future possible baldness treatments.
Software Development Completely in the Cloud - Using only a browser you can now develop, debug, and deploy software in the Cloud.
Darkmatter is an Illusion, New Antigravity Theory Says - Advances in the understanding of Darkmatter, anti-matter, and gravity.
MakerBot raises $10 Million in funding! - 3D printing - home manufacturing - is starting to develop as an industry with serious investment beginning to flow.
Nanoparticle Infused Film for Moisture-Resistant Coating can Enable Cheap Flexible Electronic Devices - Developments to help bring advanced lighting and display technologies closer to reality.
Nanomaterials: Copying Gecko's Toes - Materials engineering advance for mass producing surfaces with the adhesive properties of Gecko's toes.
Manufacturing Method Paves the way for Commercially Viable Quantum Dot-Based LEDs - Advances that also contribute to developing future lighting and display technologies.
Faster Diagnostics with Cheap, Ultra-Portable Blood Testing - Better methods to more quickly and reliably detect molecules in people's blood.
Physicists Demonstrate Quantum von-Neumann Architecture - Recent developments in the quantum computing field.
Artificial Retina Impresses, But is it Nanotechnology? - Company trying to commercialise artificial, implantable retina chip to cure and treat certain types of blindness.
GPS Receivers Now Small Enough to Attach to Literally Anything - Entire GPS systems now smaller than a coin and can be attached to even small animals for tracking.

And all of this - limited list - was just in the last, fairly typical and rather normal, week.

There seems to be so much going on now, across so many scientific and increasingly interrelated fields, that even for an enthusiast like me it is becoming hard to keep track of. The real trick, looking at the above sample list is to try to determine how this knowledge might be applied and understand what utility it might have. One needs to separate the hype from the reality, to really think about this information and the ideas it embodies, and get a feeling for what the answers are to questions such as: Is this an incremental or fundamental advance? How long until this might be embodied in a product that improves people's lives? How does this help its own, and other, fields? What other ideas might this inspire?

Can I see any novel connections where I, myself, might play a productive role?

There can be little doubt that the growth of this information flood and the on-going scientific and technical development across many disparate fields will continue to accelerate. It isn't going to slow down or reach a plateau any time soon; we informavores will continue to gorge ourselves in digital gluttony, living as we do in this Age of Information.

It is however an unfortunate truism that there are many of us far too passive in our information consumption, or at least very rarely active in this endeavour. This problem, which I liken to informational apathy, and with which we must contend was recently articulated in eloquent yet powerful fashion by Neal Gabler in his New York Times opinion piece "The Elusive Big Idea". In this excellent article, Neal rightly recognises another aspect of this informational apathy, and argues the case that we continue to allow, at our own risk, the continued descent of our society into a Post-Enlightenment, Post-Idea state. Neal infers that:

"In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us." and;

"We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism. What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it."

Let us hope we solve this problem, cure informational apathy and buck the Post-Enlightenment and Post-Idea trend. Let us hope we tame the flood and learn to think deeply about information, knowledge, and ideas again. Let us hope we all find some small productive role to play, and so Make Our Old World Into New.

image from knowmoremedia.com

The Curve Is Steepening

2011-08-06T21:07:00.000+09:30

This year I think I have started to genuinely - acutely? - feel the accelerating pace of inexorable technological advance for the first time. The curve is steepening. I’m a technophile and make sure I’m very well placed to see these things coming, to know them, be prepared for them, adapt to them, and incorporate them into my life to improve my standard of living, move on, and get ready for the next one. But to do this I assimilate large amounts of knowledge in the process of teaching myself new tricks, new skills, and new habits.

I am by nature understanding, patient, and helpful with friends and family who are not as technologically inclined as I am. I enjoy teaching and providing advice and direction when it is asked for - although I’m guilty of sometimes providing such when it is not. Over the last week or so I’ve had the feeling of this steepening curve, and of the effort required to stay ahead of it or at least on it, and the very real risk of being left behind for those who do not make these efforts.

And I’m wondering if it is perhaps these feelings that have caused, during conversations with others, background thoughts that are somewhat perplexed: What do you mean you don’t have a smartphone? What do you mean you don’t walk around with a web connection 24/7? What do you mean you haven’t uploaded all of your personal files into the Cloud? What do you mean you don’t know what the Cloud is? What do you mean you’re not on Google+? What do you mean you still believe in supernatural phenomena? Don’t you know you’re being left behind? Don’t you know what’s coming? Don’t you know the curve is only going to get steeper and harder to catch? Don’t you know the principles of physics, life, and cognition well enough to know that nothing supernatural can exist?

image from math.youngzones.org

To See Anew.

2011-02-06T17:15:00.000+10:30

It is a remarkably poetic awakening,

when one passes a threshold of knowledge,

and one's eyes truly open for the first time,

to gaze at our world anew.

To see the beauty in the present,

and gaze at the sublimity of the future,

to lose interest in human fictions,

and rediscover the magic in reality.

And so make our old world into new.

- image from venkywallpapers.com

We Will Either Be Gods Or Extinct.

2011-01-07T11:30:00.000+10:30

I occasionally peruse the KurzweilAI forums and last month came across an interesting post by "/:set\AI", which I've reproduced here in full:

QUOTE:
The whole point of this site - of Singularitarianism - is that technology cannot follow this kind of naive linear progression but is exponentially accelerating.

This ACCELERATION is the central organizing principle in the universe.

Also, human technological civilization is NOT SUSTAINABLE - even in the short term. We are a suicide machine whose ONLY way to survive is to become indestructible and immaterial; otherwise we have at MOST a century before some process working in human civilization (and beyond that time-frame a catastrophic natural disaster) sterilizes the planet or at least makes humanity go extinct.

Just one certainty is that within less than half a century it will be possible for any one individual with the will to exterminate all life with an artificial plague. Unless all humans have transcended flesh and can survive without a body, or EACH and EVERY human without exception has been neurologically reprogrammed so that socio-pathology is not possible, then this MUST happen.

There is no 3500 AD, nor even a 2500 AD, in which humans as we know them can be alive. This is simply not rational or legitimate thinking. We will either be gods or extinct; the entire 4 billion year history of Life is gambling on this one die roll in this century.

Without the acceleration and potential for transcendence, civilization can only be described as a terminal cancer (certain death for a biosphere) and the Singularity is the only reason and the only hope that intelligence and civilization has any purpose or outcome other than death.

:UNQUOTE

Some Thoughts

I agree that our current technological civilisation is in no way sustainable in the long term, particularly as it is driving to provide modern, first-world living standards to every human on the planet (itself a noble goal). The current system could provide such abundance for a (projected) population of 9 billion for a short time, if at all. The development of advanced molecular manufacturing and assembly technologies would circumvent our present technological limitations and allow greater than current first-world living standards for everyone, although I am not going to speculate on exactly how many people Earth may support in this case, nor when such technology may reach maturity. Suffice to say that when molecular manufacturing reaches maturity, I believe that our human civilisation can in theory exist and develop sustainably with no need to become indestructible or immaterial - although this may happen in any case and there will of course be the usual risks with stand-alone molecular manufacturing being developed. That being said, the risk of resource depletion and over-consumption is still real.

I also agree that well within 50 years continued technological development will have reached a point whereby any individual might contemplate the means to exterminate our species and carry forth such plans. However, I find it very hard to imagine a scenario where this is the case and both the same and other technologies are have not also been developed to the point of providing us the means by which to protect against such threats. For example, "super-vaccines" can be developed (rapidly) against "super-viruses", surveillance and monitoring systems (perhaps entailing further sacrifices of certain privacies) allow rapid quarantining and defensive responses that limit total exposure to such agents. Sure, such an attack may kill 10's of millions, but given the implausibility of developing "mega-death" agents without the corresponding multi-faceted capacity to develop protections against such, it seems unlikely - although by no means impossible - to pose a serious threat to the continuation of the species as a whole. Once again, while the risk is real (and the consequences are severe) I think the likelihood is debatable. The only guarantee is that the development of any one particular technology and its impact on society will not be clean; it will be an absolute mess of different and competing technologies that interact in complex ways.

I struggle to accept the premise of forced neurological reprogramming of any sentient creature in the vast majority of cases, especially given the deep interconnectedness of various aspects of psychology. While criminal socio-pathology is in general a bad thing and damaging to society, socio-pathology itself is not a black or white personality trait, but rather presents along a continuum of "Agreeableness" with genuine socio-pathology at the bottom end of the scale (and also at the bottom end of Conscientiousness and Neuroticism). While it is hard to argue against eliminating the very worst socio-pathology from our species' make-up (via reprogramming or otherwise), the problem you will always face in these scenarios is deciding exactly where to draw the line - or even deciding who gets to draw it. Those low in Agreeableness can certainly be successful to the benefit of others; I don't think it would be advantageous for our species to be composed of individuals too afraid of offending anyone to execute great projects and get things done. Perhaps there comes a point where everyone has a semi-regular brain-scan as part of personality profiling and those deemed at risk (requiring once again for a line to be drawn) are monitored much more closely than everyone else? The value of the adaptive flexibility enabled by the maintenance within our species of a diverse representation across the entire personality spectrum cannot be understated when it comes to survivability within any particular rapidly changing environment.

Given the expected milestones for technology development over the next 30 years I'll be very surprised in 3500AD or 2500AD if the majority of the human population is comprised of humans as we know them today. I believe it is a very safe bet that humans of 2500AD will be very, very different people to that of today. That being said I also believe and hope that there will still be some humans (a tiny fraction of a percentage of the whole?) that are indistinguishable from those of today, perhaps living untouched as indigenous hunter-gathers deep in the Amazon and other areas as some still do today, should they chose to do so. And given the rapid depletion of the most easily accessible natural resources by our civilisation it certainly appears true that post-industrial civilisations like ours are given but one shot to get it right. If we collapsed and had to start over it would seem doubtful our species could develop to the same stage again without access to the Earth's finite, and now depleted, readily accessible hydrocarbon and mineral assets. One shot. One limited pot of terrestrial natural resources with which humanity has a single attempt to transcend its physical and intellectual limitations and expand to unfathomable extra-solar resources and unassailable cosmic significance. One shot to achieve Godhood.

Life; A Definition.

2010-12-29T12:30:00.000+10:30

Life is a self-replicating, self-organising, self-regulating emergent global auto-catalytic biochemical system that is driven to evolve better ways of using the energy in sunlight* to make new copies of itself.

* In the majority of cases

Communicating Transhumanist Themes on Facebook.

2010-12-27T11:30:00.000+10:30

Last month I posted to Facebook a series of 3 status updates over consecutive days that concerned predicted advances in technological development and the impact such developments would have on my life in future. The main purpose was to communicate transhumanist themes to friends and family, challenge them with the impact such developments may have on them and the choices they might be forced to make, and see what, if anything, some people might say in response. I've shared the posts below, and relevant responses from people have been renamed to preserve anonymity. Due to the medium that is Facebook I had to structure the initial posts for brevity.

Post 1:

When I turn 50, I expect I'll be balding, my flesh will have wrinkled and sagged somewhat. I'll maintain the same healthy diet and exercise, and be in better shape than most, but I expect my joints, memory, and other things won't be as good as they are now. There may be pain and complications at times. Given the significant cognitive reserve I've built and continue to build I should still be as sharp and knowledgeable as I am, if not more so. I will be fighting entropy's inexorable pull with tooth and nail.

Responses:

None to report.

Post 2:

When I turn 70 however, I expect I'll look younger, better, and healthier than I do right now. I will be fitter, stronger, and quicker than I am right now. I will be smarter, wiser, and more knowledgeable than I am right now. I will be effectively immune to most diseases. My microbiome will have been engineered and optimised, along with my internal organs. Aging and bodily decline will be optional. This is the promise of advanced BioTechnology; as Craig Venter and others digitise biology it will trundle up the exponentially improving development curves that we take for granted in computing and deliver health treatments that are almost unimaginable today.

Responses:

Alice: The oldies of our generation will opt to keep declining, way to old school to do anything else lol mmmmmm I'm entering a mind zone of fascinating possibilities that biotech may offer....Also what about our minds... would they be affected by the change back? Would we be as we were at a younger age less educated less experienced etc

Me: For most it seems too good to be true, to actually have your cake and eat it too!

While it is fascinating to consider the additions to individual freedoms such technology will give us, it is perhaps more interesting to consider the effects on society that such technology will necessarily engender . . . what happens to relationships, the nuclear family, social institutions, work, career, retirement, etc?? Our whole society seems to be built on the tragedy of bodily and mental decline towards the monumentally wasteful travesty that is death.

I think Alice, that the key is the restoration of biological youthfulness and vitality - we would still retain the same education, experience, and memories (and to some degree the wisdom and maturity) that we had accumulated, but our brains would have the plasticity and flexibility that we enjoyed in our 20s restored, and given the biological youthfulness our hormone levels, you'd expect, would also be primed once again for the fun drives that we enjoy.

Bob: Alice, would I reverse the biological/physiological process of growing old? No. My mind is still youthful, my body is but a (perishable) vessel carrying me on my journey. I would not want to stay in a perpetual state of non-aging (if the choice becomes available as in Mark's preposition). I have no wish to miss the experience of growing old (good or bad), in fact the thought of staying at any one age or in a state of permanent good health is not for me. I'm not Peter Pan, and I have no wish to be.

As for our minds being affected by 'the change back'; if science as a whole advances in the way Mark is postulating, then the age you will have reached when you start on this course of suspension of the deterioration of your physiolgical and nuerological self (in simple terms that's what it is), is the 'age' you will stay. Until you choose to let nature take it's course, of course. You would not be able to 'turn back the clock' so to speak, but be able to suspend the body's ability to age. You would also be able to 'rewire' your brain, that is, create new pathways to and with the areas of our brains that for the most part lie dormant. A bit like having a 1 terabite hard drive on your PC and only storing the operating system on there. lol
..And less of the 'oldie' nonsense ye wee tike. lol

Alice: re possibilities are far from reality to me although I don't doubt we will oneday experience life so differently to now. I think the process of aging, experiencing, learning, teaching, loving 'living' appeals to much to me to give it up to remain youthfull bring on the oldie life ;) could it really be called living anymore if we physically aren't progressing to an end point? Sorry mark I'm on the oldies team but hey ill still love you when I'm old and wrinkly and you look younger then me xxx

Me: Well I guess that's the difference between that minority of the population like me and everyone else. I violently abhor the whole concept of an "end point"; why oh why does the journey have to have some biologically arbitrary ending? So long as you're on the journey of life then it is most definitely living, most definitely progressing, regardless of whether there is an end point or not. I think "experiencing, learning, teaching, loving, living" as you say is what makes life special and worthwhile, and, completely opposite to your conclusion is the very reason to remain youthful - so you can do more of this for longer; the desire to grow old implies that you look forward to the day when you get to do none of this, no?

Good thing this technology will not be forced on anyone - it will be completely optional. Everyone will be free to choose to grow old and die if they desire it. It just means that I'll have to cherish all the more those times and moments we spend together over the next incredibly brief 3 score years, as I look forward to aeons of living with you not around (although, at least with artificial memory implants, my memories of you won't fade).

I love this beautiful world and our very fallible human condition far too much to ever want to stop experiencing it. To embrace death is to dive into oblivion and the destruction of all that is dear.

The thing is I will get what you want anyway. Many times over. Over such an incredibly - indefinitely - long life, plugged in for some extent to indistinguishably realistic virtual worlds running on advanced computational substrates, I will live 1,000's of different lives, in many different worlds, set at many different times. I will get to experience birth, aging, and death . . . and all the delicious loves, losses, triumphs, failures, families, and friendships that entails . . . over, and over, and over again. I will die countless times. But death in these virtual (for all intents and purposes real) worlds will be simply the ending of yet another chapter in an astronomically vast book . . . it will not end my journey; I will continue living, learning, experiencing, and loving.

Alice: I don't know if id live life to the fullest knowing I could control so much would it still be as you describe above... wonderfully challenging, high and low, disapointing and fullfilling...knowing I could leave it (virtual world) anytime I pleased or control it anyway I would I think id find myself depressed with the effortlessness, the easiness, the lack of challenge knowing I controlled the reward, id be depressed despite having the most amazing wonderful possibilities known to man. Perhaps shorter 'holliday' fanntasies iin virtual worlds would keep me entertained like realistic dreams, but I think id predominantly live I the 'unknown, uncontrollable and often disapointig yet fullfilling world of my reality'. Totally thinks its all just amazing as a possibility and I guess as with all technologies we will adapt and progess as it has always manipulated us to do :) xxx

Post 3:

When I turn 90 however, I expect I will have abandoned this (BioTechnology-enhanced) flesh altogether. My mind (memories, personality, emotions, knowledge, etc) will reside on an artificially engineered (virtually indestructible) synthetic material that allows me to think 1,000 times faster than a normal brain, and my intelligence, memory, knowledge, etc will have been massively augmented to astronomical proportions. I'll be intimately networked into the pervasive machine that the Internet will have become with the worlds knowledge and communication to any being available at a whim. I'll flit in and out of fantastic photo-realistic virtual worlds as easily as I continue to interact with our beautiful real world through a beautifully engineered body that looks, feels, and sounds the same as a better version of the one I have right now, when I choose it to. Make no mistake. This is the promise of advanced NanoTechnology and the development of artificially intelligent machines with individual cognitive abilities that vastly exceed the combined intelligence of every biological human on the planet.

Responses:

Jane: seems to me like you'll barely be you, but rather a clone ofr technology. Unfortunately I suspect that if it ever happens, then there will be an awful lot of other clones and the world will loose something special- the things about us that make us unique.

Me: I think I’ll be very much me . . . just “more” so. Not a clone of technology, just merged with technology as part of our next evolutionary advance. You are correct in suspecting that there will be many people who opt-in for such enhancements and merging with technology, but there will also be many who do not. Humanity will splinter.

There will still be fully biologically unaltered “natural” humans, but there will also be biological humans who have been genetically engineered to some degree, genetically enhanced humans who have melded with some amount of synthetic / cybernetic implants for further enhancements, and then also those who opt for full synthetic transcendence to a non-biological state that allows them to fully partake of an enjoy a conventional biological existence as well as all the other non-biological options that will be available to them.

When you talk of the world losing something with the development of such technology and changes in our societies it reminds me of another example that happened a long time ago. Some hundreds of thousands of years in our early evolutionary past you can picture our ape-human ancestors about to fully develop language abilities – the world after this “event” would turn out to be a very different world to that before the “event” and so too our ancestors would become very different creatures.

The launch of symbolic language changed Earth forever, empowering the species (and their brains) that invented it to the top of the food chain by developing technology that reshaped the environment, changed the atmosphere, caused the extinction of 1000s of species and yet still continues unabated. Might these our ancestors also have thought that their society, culture, and world would lose something special, lose their own uniqueness as their species adopted the deceptively powerful technology we call “language”?

We find ourselves on the cusp of an even bigger “event”. One that will drastically change our world, our society, and our species forever. Sure, we might lose something in the process, like our ancestors did, but just like them we stand to gain unfathomably fantastic benefits, riches, and lives in the process.

Please tell me Jane: what is this unique or special thing about us that you think we will lose?

(I also have some other comments in yesterday’s “When I turn 70 . . . “ thread that you might find interesting)

Jane: I had seen the comments before and had chosen to bite my tongue; as I have opinions which are contrary to this one. However given that you have asked......

There are three ideas I'd like to present that are part observation, and part of what I've picked up due to my widely read nature and partly what I've studied in human development. I'd also like to add now that I don't entirely believe some of the theory that I am presenting; but then I don't entirely believe evolution occurred quite the way you present it- needless to say it is something that COULD/ COULD HAVE happened and in that needs to be considered and potentially planned for.

Firstly in answering the question what it is that makes us unique? I'm not really sure. But somewhere in that genetic roulette of ours everyone is made unique. As humans we share likes and dislikes- with some more closely than others; but among that huge population out there, you will never find someone that completely mirrors you. every now and then within that genetic roulette it throws out brilliance- the Albert Einstein's, Mozart's Piccasso's, Ghandi, Mother Theresa are the famous, that depict some of the different fields of various forms of intelligence (scientific, artistic, social) all people who achieve great things because they think outside the box- which is something that you should recognise I think Mark as you have a tendency to do it yourself! These people relied on their human brain and were often in their life times considered to be whack jobs, heretics etc, but history has shown that undeniably, they achieved brilliance.

The observation part of what I'd like to impart I'll illustrate with a story from something that happened when I was last in Adelaide. As you know I am a country bumpkin and as such, a jack of all trades, master of none. Give my family any job/ something to fix and we can probably fix it to the point where we will "get by" a lot more efficiently than our city counterparts. We tend to be not as specialized in a any one field of expertise, but are much more likely to know a little about a lot, and are much more likely to have a go and see if we can (or can find out how) before we seek an expert. 8/10 times we have no need to find the expert; once we still need to and once we stuff in up and end up having to pay more.

Living in that sort of environment, and encouraging self sufficiency, curiosity and observation in my children, last time we were in Adelaide they were gob-smacked to see a group of people standing at the traffic lights waiting for them to turn green despite the lack of traffic to be seen in any direction. (Yes we crossed the road and reached our destination before the others moved.) I suspect what happened at the lights was that one person stopped and the rest followed his lead, however I'd like to ask a few questions now in regards to the new advances in science.

If you chose to become enhanced, do you suspect that you would be the only person to choose those enhancements, or do you think it would become like all the latest advances in technology and become something that everybody "has to have"- and therefore would you turn yourself into a clone every other man who wanted to live forever? I am sure you have a reasonable idea of the costing of the research, and realise that at the end of it all they will want to recoup their money- so how are they going to market it? There is a real danger that in jumping on board you then become part of the masses.

Second question- if you believe that your brain, being computer enhanced is better, will you rely on that enhanced brain rather than continuing to think outside the square and if that is the case, will the enhancement slowly strangle the brilliance that the genetic roulette of life throws out?- ie you become like the crowd of people standing on the pavement waiting for the lights to turn green because that is what you are programed to do?

Third question- if you do continue to think outside the square; and you come up with a theory that the computer that is enhancing your mind believes impossible, will it then cause an internal conflict, will you never get the thought, will you not be able to develop the thought what happens then? Most advances that have been made evolve from thoughts that people have believed at some time are not conceivably possible.

Second part of what I'd like to question you on which is partly knowledge that I have acquired due to my love of reading and is a theory which while I believe is interesting and has some valid points but that I don't believe will happen quite as dramatically as is being predicted. I don't know if you have seen the theories on complete economic global collapse due to the unsustainable nature of our lifestyles? Basically it runs along the lines that the cash injections such as the economic stimulus package that the KRudd Govt introduced here and the similar strategies introduced overseas are creating an artificial "bubble" that is unsustainable, and that when the debt is eventually recalled/ or a new stimulus can't be put in to place because we have spent beyond our limits, then society will go into a state of total collapse because the resources we need to prop up our lifestyles are no longer available to us- how do you get to work with no petrol? How do you cook with no electricity gas delivery? What do you eat when the supermarkets are empty?

Even those that are getting solar panels are using them for on grid production, which means that if the grid goes down, the electricity is still being made, but is inaccessible to your house. The theory goes on to point out that many of the things that society idolizes- the quick and easy- are snuffing out the knowledge that we need in order to survive should such a collapse ever occurred and that potentially, at some point in time, we are living in a period which will be know as the dark ages in the future. If those resources are lost, there is no record of knowledge that will be kept- no photos etc. as it is all stored digitally. What happened to the Incas and the Aztecs? We don't really know- there is no record of the end. What happened to society as we know it- well what the fuck did they use this square piece of plastic and metal junk for?

As I said, I don't believe that it will happen as dramatically as predicted, but I do agree that those things that are necessary to sustain life are being lost. My family had to go through a fairly dramatic lifestyle change when we discovered food intolerances; so I can take a recipe back to basics, make my own stock (as in chicken stock) my own soft white cheese (if I want), my own flour, my own pasta sauces etc. etc. etc. My partner is great at growing veggies but we have our own bore which requires electricity to pump the water up . . . . . . . oops! I also realise that I am much more self sufficient than most of my peers- (mainly by choice- I prefer the fresh, organic but don't like to pay for it! ) I also realise that in a collapse I still don't know enough to keep my family going and in that the theory is right- there would be a big learning curve for those left alive if it did happen, because the skills needed to sustain life are being lost.

It is much easier to buy than to make, to get out the chainsaw to cut the wood than do it manually, to grab what is on offer rather than to do it yourself. However there is a sense of acheivement in being able to do it yourself, and the muscles you develop in the process seem much more viable than those gained at the gym (I discovered that when we couldn't borrow a chainsaw as Phil's brother broke it and we wanted the tree in the driveway gone before fire season)

In such a scenario Mark, if life was technologically enhanced, what exactly would happen to your brain? And also what would happen to all the other senses that make life what you live and love? Can you really live it if all the experiences are theoretical? What happens to the experiences in life that you wouldn't choose- the painful things- that you look back on and say, well I wouldn't choose it and I can't say that I enjoyed them but I like the person they have helped me develop into? What happens to the next generation? Can you have a next generation, or does it become all about you? And are you really there at all? Would those "real" people; those that don't chose to become enhanced bother to turn you on, or would they turn to those who are naturally brilliant? Would you really exist at all, or would the future generations develop better and bigger just as we have, and ignore the old technology? Would you become the "what the fuck is that piece of e-junk? Do you lose part of the experience of life if all your experiences are virtual- after all, most virtual experience is based on the real life experience of someone and if there is no model- well, what then?

Someone needs to update the program for you to experience the different lives of others and for that you are relying on the future generations to care about what you have done- and to keep caring rather than making their own advancements. Would you live your Dad's life, or do you think some of the things your generation have done have improved the quality of yours AND his? DO you own a mobile phone that doesn't look like a brick? Did your dad ever eat the exotic cuisine you've tried (and probably introduced him to?) Would you want to become like the farming families of old and do what dad did just because you were told- because unless your system is completely autonomous then that is what you are prescribing for future generations.

The third point is based on what I have studied in human development, and the different ages and stages that we pass through as we approach death. While previously theoretically it was all downhill after thirty- both physically and mentally, there is now the belief that while there is still an acknowledged physical decline there are certain life experience and mental growth for want of a better word that happen in later life. Unfortunately, I don't think those mental developments are made except for the realization of the fallibility of life- the oxymoron is that without the deterioration you cant make the progress!

Future generations have an important job in the mentoring of the younger generation, and it is those that do that then become "well looked after" in their old age; both by their memories and by those that they have sown into. There is an elegance and a grace in growing old well that I am quite looking forward to- and no that doesn't mean that I am racing for the wheel chair and I think that part of that grace requires a fight of the aging process and in that I fight to stay as fit and as active as my 20 something counterparts- I just acknowledge that maybe my boobs are a bit closer to my belly button than theirs! I don't actually think that in fighting the aging process with technology is actually going to enhance the life experience, and will to a large extent detract from it.

I think that while there are definite advantages in being able to stay physically fit, I wonder if in doing it by surgical enhancement, you lose the satisfaction gained in the struggle to achieve it. But then I am more likely to cut up a limb with a handsaw, or lift a bucket of milk or pull a calf to gain my muscles, find going to the gym mind numbing and frustrating and that may well be the difference between you and I. I suspect that we embrace life differently- which is not wrong in itself, just different.

I also wonder whether part of the difference is that I believe that there is more to death than just becoming the latest brand of fertilizer (although with the amount of preservatives they pump into a body and the wooden box they surround it with you become not very good fertilizer!), and in that I don't think I have the same abhorrence to death that you do, i am quite happy to say that my life experience is mine, I don't particularly want anybody else's or a variety of them, I am quite happy with the one I've got and am more than happy to share it with the people that I have in it. I am also more than happy to share it with e-people for a want of a better term of what you are trying to describe.

I actually hope that some of the questions that we have iron out some of the problems that may forseeably arrive and I suggest that you also look at the problems that have arisen in the GM modified stuff from the farmers- or those on the grounds point of view and use that experience as well. (Look at how it has affected other crops and also the eco-system around it; what it has done for weed resistance in chemicals, and how it has affected the pollinating insects.) Use other peoples mistakes and successes order to enhance your design- or at least make different mistakes- and also remember that every experiment such as what is being created has the potential to do the exact opposite of what is intended and that is a risk you take!

Just a note at the end to say that I have actually gone a lot harder at what you are looking at than i think it deserves, largely because I hope it will cause you to ask questions as I believe its the questions that you ask as you are creating that achieve the brilliance as a result. I hope that I haven't caused too much offense in doing so, but instead cause you to question more! (I also haven't read and edited what I have written as I have noticed that facebook has a tendency to lose it if you do, and I am too lazy to type in word and then cut and paste- (which sounds slightly pathetic when you look at it like that) but I hope that it makes sense (and that betrays my perfectionist tendency's which rarely surface as they are constantly at war with the laziness thing!) Hope you've enjoyed the read- and sorry it's become so long winded- I have always had trouble with brief!

Me: Please excuse my brevity - there was a lot to read and a lot to write and not much time to do it in!!!

There is never anything wrong with expressing contrary opinions . . . so long as its done with the same feeling and civility as the rest of the thread! :)

RE Traffic lights: There are some good psychological explanations for the behaviour that you observed, but thankfully (in your case!) common sense won out!

RE Choosing enhancements – along with everyone else: No I don't think I would be the only one to choose the enhancements; I think lots of people would. As mentioned above I think our species will splinter somewhat into (1) biologically normal / unchanged humans, (2) humans with some degree of genetic engineering, (3) humans with some degree of genetic engineering & cybernetic / artificial / synthetic components, and (4) humans that are fully merged technology and effectively uploaded to a synthetic substrate (no biology). Furthermore options (2), (3), and (4) are fully customisable – I think it unlikely that any two people would have exactly the same enhancements; everyone would be different to some degree and there certainly wouldn't be clones of everyone running around. I certainly don't think there is any basis or danger of “jumping on board and becoming part of the masses”; we, all of us, are already part of the “masses”.

RE Cost of research and recouping investment: It will cost “a lot”. You could have a “user” pays model I guess, but at the end of the day, given the massive changes that these technologies will force our society through I strongly believe that they will be effectively free at some point. They all become digital. Costs trend to zero. Quickly.

RE My computer enhanced brain and thinking outside the square: My mind will be transferred to a synthetic computational substrate whose architecture and functioning effectively mimics how brains work (my biological brain will have been discarded / destroyed in the process) – the preservation of the PATTERN of neuronal connections is what is important, regardless whether that pattern resides on a biological brain or a synthetic one. The thing to understand is that such an enhanced mind / brain (with all relevant upgrades in speed / memory / intelligence / etc) will be more brilliant, more intelligent, more “out side the square thinking” than Einstein . . . as Einstein is to a rat . . . or an ant. I'm serious. It will also engender comparable improvements in creativity, artistic ability, and the capacity for love, joy, and happiness. As compared to a normal human, as a human is to a rat . . . or an ant. Such minds / brains on artificial (non-biological) materials are not programmed like the conventional computers that you are familiar with, but like brains.

RE Entertaining theories that a computer might believe are impossible: As per the above point there is no conflict, i.e. I will be as capable of entertaining impossible theories as Einstein was to a rat, etc.

RE Societal collapse: There is an ever-decreasing amount of time whereby the societal collapse you talk about has profoundly negative impact on citizens. The development of all these advanced technologies serve to actually make the individual somewhat independent of the whole, especially with regard to food, shelter, water, energy, material goods, etc. All can be produced on-site with intelligent agents and molecular manufacturing.

RE Societal collapse #2: If I am technologically enhanced and a collapse occurs it will have next to no effect on my well being. As indicated originally I will continue to interact with the world through a physical body that you would not be able to tell was biological or not. I can delegate the building of shelter, power supplies, “food”, etc to intelligent agents that I control. I would still interact with the world through the senses that I normally enjoy (although these will be enhanced) and am somewhat horrified to think that I have been so misunderstood that you think I would wish this otherwise!? I will have physical experiences like normal people. But I will also have virtual (“theoretical”) experiences too. Some of my virtual experiences will include painful ones.

RE Future generations: I would be part of the future generations, upgraded continually, I would never be “old” technology.

RE: Virtual experiences: As per above points. Not all my experiences will be virtual. I will still live in the world.

RE “Unfortunately, I don't think those mental developments are made except for the realization of the fallibility of life- the oxymoron is that without the deterioration you cant make the progress!”: I strongly disagree. I think this is part of the “naturalistic”, “traditional” bullshit that society has been brainwashed with.

RE “I don't actually think that in fighting the aging process with technology is actually going to enhance the life experience, and will to a large extent detract from it.”: I very very very profoundly disagree.

RE “I think that while there are definite advantages in being able to stay physically fit, I wonder if in doing it by surgical enhancement, you lose the satisfaction gained in the struggle to achieve it.” Perhaps. But a decrepit natural 120 year old isn't going to be able to do any of those things; artificial intervention is the only way. The sooner the better.

RE “I suspect that we embrace life differently- which is not wrong in itself, just different.”: This one sentence screams out loud and clear that you are open minded and considerate :)

RE “I also wonder whether part of the difference is that I believe that there is more to death than just becoming the latest brand of fertilizer.” Perhaps. For me there is no evidence to the contrary; you become fertiliser and your mind disappears into oblivion . . . the same oblivion as you “experienced before you were born”.

RE “I hope that I haven't caused too much offense in doing so, but instead cause you to question more!”: No offense in the slightest! I've questioned all of this more than 99.999% of the people on this planet. I hope my post and answers clarified my position / addressed any confusion and continues to cause you to question more.

Take care :)

Henry Markram's Blue Brain Project

2010-09-07T00:46:00.000+09:30

Last week I sat down and devoted nearly two full hours to watching lectures by Henry Markram. And I have commenter "Brain2045" to thank, who provided the links on this Next Big Future post on the "Status of Reverse Engineering the Brain", which is itself an interesting summary. Some of you will know Markram as the chief computational / modelling neuroscientist driving the Blue Brain Project, which is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations - currently on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Many others like myself consider the Blue Brain Project to be one of the most important undertakings that our human-machine civilisation is presently engaged in.

The first talk is from the Neuro Informatics 2008 conference and can be seen: here.

The second talk is his Inaugural Lecture at the EPFL: Reconstructing the Heart of Mammalian Intelligence.

While there is a little bit of overlap in sections, both talks are independently excellent and introduce many novel concepts and discussion points:

The accelerating move this century, already begun, from independent laboratory or cottage-level science to industrial or factory-level science capable of applying sheer brute force to scientific questions. Provided the funding is available, scientists can simply order many things that previously had to be painstakingly performed by hand in the laboratory. This trend of industrialisation of science is inevitable and unstoppable due to sheer faster / cheaper economics it provides. The Human Genome Project and Blue Brain Project are good examples of this.

As an example of the power of this approach, the group had to review much of the field of neuroscience when putting together their neuronal models. Due to some gaps and other inconsistencies they were forced to re-do the last 50 years of neuroscience, which they were able to accomplish in a matter of months because of the industrial scale of the operation.

To the question: "Why does IBM help fund this work? What's in it for them with regard to simulated brains?" Markram responds by rephrasing the question after noting that human brain is similar to an incredibly parallel exaflop (10^18) computer that runs on 60 Watts of power and: "What would you do to get your hands on a 60 Watt exaflop supercomputer?" Reverse engineering the brain will enable new paradigms for computing and chip-sets in the future.

The Blue Brain Project completed its first milestone in successfully simulating a typical 10,000 neuron / 30 million synapse neocortical column. Neocortical columns are the basic or general information processing unit of the brain and are highly evolutionarily conserved, being almost identical between different mammalian species (rats - humans) and between different processing regions of the brain (auditory - visual cortex). Also, it appears that it is not just your visual cortex involved in processing your vision, but rather the whole brain because you need the rest of the brain and its interrelated connections in order to provide the meaning and context in what you see.

The project aims to scale up sufficiently to complete a full human brain simulation by 2018 - 2020. Once complete this first reverse engineering project will comprise a "template" brain or full brain connectome for general purpose applications. In future a personal scan (both genome and connectome) of your brain could be used to modify this base template in order to make a copy of your brain and, in principle, a copy of you. This could be used for a range of purposes including diagnosing and treating any cognitive decline or damage, and also assist in mind uploading.

At the connection points between neurons there are typically two (often multiple) synapses to mediate the signalling / communication. This is particularly interesting considering the recent discovery of how two memristors in series can reproduce Hebbian-style synaptic behaviour more or less exactly, which provides a promising outlook for the current development and goals of neuromorphic chips.

The gene expression of individual neurons has been analysed to such a fine extent that the analysis of the gene expression alone of a neuron can be used to accurately predict exactly what ion channels are on the neuron's surface, what type of neuron it is, and what characteristic firing pattern the neuron possessed.

One of the more interesting things, from a philosophical perspective, that Markram discussed was a theory of consciousness that he thought was supported by what the Project had uncovered. The structure of these neocortical columns is such that the neurons are packed thickly together with a literal forest of dendrites and branches. Any sensory input stimulates signalling cascades down these columns, with the patterns of electrical-chemical activity being a direct representation, a scaled-down model of the real world such that the world is represented within the brain. You, your conscious awareness, is these patterns of electrical-chemical activity that correspond to real world patterns and shapes. It'll be interesting to see how this is supported by additional research and brain imaging studies, although I'm left wondering what "shape" the pattern of signalling for the subjective experience of love is.

Markram was interviewed by SEED Magazine back in 2008:

Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes self-consciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.

Finally, Markram was invited to TED in October 2009 and gave another excellent, although concise talk on recent developments with the Blue Brain Project. This is shown below; it is 16 minutes long and well worth watching.

Science is a Communal and Recursive Epistemology Algorithm.

2010-09-04T11:25:00.000+09:30

A tweet today from @afoolswisdom got me thinking about what science is and what role it has within our society. It said: "Science is a social epistemology algorithm."

@afoolswisdom is a philosopher from Edinburgh with "uninhibited curiosity" that frequently tweets interesting insights and observations on topics that include science, philosophy, and society and I'd definitely recommend you follow him if you share similar interests.

The key word in this delicious little observation of course is "epistemology", which refers to the branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge. And so "Science is a social epistemology algorithm" is basically saying that science, the human endeavour, is a process that (computes?) explores the limits of knowledge via the transmission of information between many different people in our society.

However, upon entering my mind this meme was very quickly memetically spliced and recombined into a slightly different form, a form that adds the terms "communal" and "recursive". Communal in the sense that - for better or worse - scientific knowledge and progress is typically constrained within certain communities of people and is unfortunately not part of most of society's day-to-day experience. Recursive in the sense that it is a repeated process that feeds in on itself, with the seeds of yesterday's knowledge used to create the fruit of today and which will in turn be used to create the knowledge of tomorrow. So science is an algorithm concerning the knowledge of things that feeds recursively within and between certain communities. Thus,

Science is a communal and recursive epistemology algorithm.

Magnetically Interfacing With Your Brain

2010-08-19T11:30:00.000+09:30

In my earlier post on Mind Uploading I discussed the possibility of micro-sized neruo-bots interfacing directly with your neurons and wirelessly transmitting each neuron's behaviour and signalling to an external computer via nanoantennas. Of course, at the time very basic proof-of-concept nanoantennas had been demonstrated, but the technical ability for a computer to wirelessly communicate with objects interfacing with neurons still seemed somewhat distant.

But in June 2010 Prof. Arnd Pralle and his research group at the University of Buffalo published a very basic proof-of-concept of this technical capability in a Nature Nanotechnology manuscript "Remote control of ion channels and neurons through magnetic-field heating of nanoparticles". The paper describes the development of the technique whereby nanoparticles measuring 6nm in diameter are genetically targeted to specific types of cells and in this case lodge into the cell walls of neurons. When an external magnetic field is switched on the nanoparticles in the cell wall heat up slightly, the results of which include opening calcium channels in the cell wall and activating neuronal cells. Further, in a live animal system (a simple nematode worm) activation of a magnetic field was shown to cause the animals to abruptly reverse direction - by flicking a switch their behaviour had been altered wirelessly by the magnetic field as a result of influencing particles that were interfaced directly with neurons in the animal. An image from one of the movies of the worm abruptly reversing is below, but you can see the movie here.

As far as demonstrating wireless interfacing of brains with machines goes . . . this might generously be considered a very primitive and crude proof-of-principle.

As a proof-of-principle the system basically allows "writing" information to particular neurons and would need to be substantially redesigned in order to "read" information from neurons for transmission back to a computer. But even as a write-only system it could still be put to use, for example, as a replacement for certain drugs. If the nanoparticles could be targeted to dopaminergic neurons (whose primary transmitter is dopamine) then you might be able to reduce the need for medications including those for Parkinson's disease. Instead of taking a pill, such a system might provide a more accurate and timely intervention on a periodic basis as required. With appropriate feedback from the patient's brain, second-by-second optimisation of the patient's dopaminergic system might be possible. The whole system could be very portable, with a solenoid in a headband - or possibly inserted inside the skull - able to induce the required magnetic fields.

While we're idly speculating about possible future uses, one development to consider would be redesigned nanoparticles made of metamaterials that are tuned to different energies or oscillation frequencies of magnetism. This might allow you to target different types of nanoparticles to different types of neurons and allow the same "headband" to influence multiple, different effects for the patient at the same time. Could the evolution of such a system lead to it inputting signals into our sensory neurons in such a way as to immerse us in photo-realistic virtual worlds? Who knows. While we're a long way off it'll be interesting to see how systems like these are developed over the next 10 or so years.

Replication Within the "Game of Life": Inspiration for Physical Implementation

2010-07-22T11:30:00.000+09:30

NewScientist has a recent article on the development of the first replicating creature to be created in "The Game of Life". I think this is significant for a number of reasons and the inspiration for further development and ultimately physical embodiment suggests some fantastic applications.

Background

"The Game of Life" is a simple mathematical cellular automaton program that is run on a 2D grid of squares. Squares can either be "on" or "off", with the user selecting a pattern of "on" squares to start with then running the program step by step with simple rules determining whether the "on" squares or their neighbours turn "on" or "off" during the next step. This simple premise and almost trivial methematical curiosity is interesting because from such simple and humble beginnings, a random initial configuration - or pattern - can give rise to striking complexity and emergent self organisation over successive steps. Originally developed by mathematician John Conway in 1970, a robust community of enthusiasts and developers have grown up around Life to explore an ever-more-diverse array of interesting patterns with a range of properties including periodic oscillation and movement across the grid.

You should definitely go and play The Game of Life yourself: play here

Click some random patterns into the grid and click "Start", play around with the preset patterns (check out the glider) and options in the drop-down menus and see what you can create; you'll be surprised with the difference that turning a single square "on" or "off" in a pattern will do to its behaviour. For example, click (activate) 9 grid squares in a row to make a horizontal line and then "start" and it quickly settles into a "boring" steady state; but repeat and click just one more square on either end to make a line 10 squares long and you start to get a far more interesting oscillating behaviour. A quick example of a simple 3-step oscillator from Wikipedia commons (note you can recreate this pattern via the above link and "run" it) is below:

Significance

With the recent development, Game of Life enthusiast Andrew Wade succeeded in creating the first self-replicating pattern. This pattern has been referred to by some as "the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised", and "demonstrates how astounding complexity can arise from simple beginnings and processes". Once again for emphasis: a pattern, following very simple rules, has demonstrated emergent behaviour, and is capable of replicating itself.

One of the more interesting things about this pattern is that is uses an instruction tape to help it replicate and also destroy the original copy. This inspires conceptual similarities to DNA, the instruction tape of biological life. The NewScientist video of the development, which shows the pattern in action, is here:

To be fair, there has been some controversy concerning how significant the development actually is, with some arguing that by destroying the original copy it is merely a pattern that moves in an interesting way, and to be a real replicator then the original copy must be preserved and, ideally, both parent and offspring continue to replicate themselves.

Also, Stephen Wolfram, arguably the most prominent champion of cellular automatons as a whole (not just the subset in the Game of Life), comments that "feeding a program to a universal constructor merely to create a self-replicating creature - as per Von Neumann's original suggestion - is overkill; there exist much simpler cellular automatons able to duplicate certain types of patterns." He finishes with: "This discovery is helping us understand the world of constructing things from dumb components. Wade's discovery could help devise ways to build a molecular-scale computer, starting from tiny components." More examples and information on Wolfram's cellular automatons can be found via WolframAlpha.

Wolfram's last statement above resonates strongly with my own thinking. When I first read about the development of this replicating cellular automaton in the Game of Life one of the main things that got me excited was considering how such a simple software application could be realised on a molecular scale with an actual physical implementation.

Implementation onto Nano-Engineered Surfaces

Conceptually, what I initially have in mind is a nano-engineered surface comprised of a functional grid of nano-molecular structures designed such that they can interact with or activate their neighbours in the same rule-like fashion as the digital cells in the original Game of Life, perhaps via controllable chemical or mechanical reactions. The individual structures may incorporate some energy-harvesting reversible computing principles, or else be powered either electronically via connections beneath the surface or optically via incident light. Electrical, optical, and even mechano-chemical signals can imprint an initial pattern onto the grid, set the pattern running as per normal Game of Life rules, reset the surface back to a "blank" unpatterned state, and input or output patterns or signals as required.

This surface would constitute a form of digital matter that essentially reduces the mathematical behaviour of the Game of Life onto a physical substrate. The behaviour of such a surface following Game of Life rules would be a hyper-speed blur as the mechano-chemical reactions activated their neighbours in trillionths of a second. Wade's self replicating patterns, or improved functional variants thereof, would replicate and race around the surface at lightning speed and much faster than any mathematical or graphical representation of the Game of Life on a computer. Essentially, any pattern that you could create and watch evolve virtually on a computer, you could implement to move and evolve on a real physical system.

Such a surface would initially be little more than an intriguing novelty, even if extended in a volume comprised of a functional matrix of similar nano-molecular structures able to evolve patterns in 3 dimensions. But the crucial thing to realise here is that for such a functional material, the hardware IS the software, and just like in biological systems the structure IS the function. Combine this with the fact that Game of Life enthusiasts have designed patterns that function as a Universal Turing Machine that are able to compute any arbitrary program, and also that instruction tapes (programs) can be fed into and initiate the controlled function of both the self-replicating patterns and the Turing Machine patterns, and some very interesting possibilities begin to emerge.

Firstly, you could populate such a functional surface or chip with an array of Turing Machine patterns that you could then feed appropriately patterned (programmed) instruction tapes; such a chip could perform useful and incredibly rapid computations. Such a nano-scale mechano-chemical computational system would embody the ultimate miniaturised version of the Analytical Engine, Charles Babbage's mechanical general-purpose computer that he first described in 1837. This is aligned with what Wolfram was referring to when he said, "Wade's discovery could help devise ways to build a molecular-scale computer, starting from tiny components."

Going a step further with a suitably designed instruction tape you could link the replicating patterns with the computational patterns (Universal Turing Machines) in a way such that the mechano-chemical chip managed its own processing requirements and power consumption. Starting with just one or two functional computing patterns as a base state, if the computational load increased the computing units would replicate, splitting the computational demands into multi-parallel threads across 2, 4, 8, 16, etc processors as needed. While systems of arbitrary size may be constructed, keep in mind that a useful, fully-functional chip might need be no larger than a cubic micrometer, and easily small enough to fit inside a human cell.

While we're letting speculation - and our imaginations - run wild, why not take it a step further, and not just into the 3rd dimension with a mechano-chemical functional volume as suggested above (although as a form of computronuim this would certainly be interesting!), nor even linking sensory information from the environment in addition to electrical signals into the material via specially modified mechano-chemical units that can respond to light, sound, and pressure incident on the edges of the mass (although that too also raises some fascinating possibilities), but how about the generation of an extra class of rules that alter the very shape of the landscape itself. This extra class of rule would not activate or deactivate the functional units, but rather (reversibly) sever the connection between them and initiate rotational movement of disconnected units such that the gross shape or topology of the material - a surface or volume depending on the application - changes while still maintaining full pattern processing functionality with the same total surface area or volume / mass as before.

A simple example would be a rectangular surface that responds to a certain pattern running over its surface by reconfiguring itself into a square with the same surface area. Or a circle, etc. Another example would be a surface that responds to a certain pattern by folding itself up into a closed box with the cellular automaton patterns continuing to flow around the outside or inside of the surface of the box. A more advanced example would be a cube of functional material with three dimensional cellular automaton patterns running within its volume, some patterns of which trigger rules that cause the structure to morph and flow, split and twist into almost any shape imaginable.

The cube might turn into a scale model of a C60 buckyball as easily as a sphere. A yet more advanced example would see the functional material able to maintain regular, directed movement of different parts of its mass, take in sensory information from the environment, internally carry a massive level of computation via Universal Turing Machine patterns, and internally carry significant levels of (sentient?) neuromorphic computation via cellular automaton patterns that might mimic the behaviour of neurons . . . imagine the "liquid metal" T1000 from Terminator 2 for a rather crude and limited example of basic proposed capabilities.

Such a fantastically functional form of digital matter begins sounding very much like conventionally proposed programmable matter realisations such as Claytronics. You can see a recent review on the future impacts of programmable matter including an animated demonstration here. The difference between the two of course is that Claytronics and other instances of programmable matter are inherently complex - incredibly so considering the programming, physical design, and manufacturing involved - whereas cellular automaton enabled functional materials are inherently simple, and possibly more adaptable.

Despite this simplicity, the controlled activation and movement of functional sub-units following simple rules could lead to complex emergent behaviour on a scale from interesting novelty to intelligent and very capable agent. The creation of materials that display such emergent and very interesting behaviour from very simple principles will constitute the embodiment of hitherto now abstract mathematical concepts into a solid and very real physical form.

But In The Near Term

However, the immediate significance that I can see for this is as one of those fortuitous and unexpected fundamental developments that serves to inspire the whole community who work in this area of endeavour. Wade has constructed the simplest possible pattern he could that would work to replicate itself. With this foundation in place we can expect a spike of development activity as many other Game of Life programmers and enthusiasts play with and experiment with this pattern. Some of the improvements we might see include:

Patterns that genuinely keep on replicating (leaving the original copy intact and functional)

Replicating patterns that have additional functionality such as movement

Replicating patterns in a 3D Game of Life environment rather than 2D (note that 3D Game of Life environments already exist, just no replicating patterns, see: this 3D example that you can twist and rotate in 3D)

Replicating patterns across different Game of Life or cellular automaton substrates, for example, by using different rules or different grid arrays (you can play with a hexagonal Game of Life grid)

These and other ongoing developments suggest that Wolfram was indeed correct when he said that we would mine the computational Universe increasingly into the future for algorithms and patterns of interest. The possibilities from a purely computational viewpoint of scientific understanding from such discoveries are even more interesting when you consider that such cellular automatons:

Have been and continue to be used for physical modelling of natural processes by substituting for conventional physical models and relationships. Might all physical laws be reducible to certain cellular automatons?

As discussed above, have been designed into patterns, such as in the Game of Life, that are Turing complete e.g. patterns that essentially function as a Turing machine and are able to compute. A pattern for a Universal Turing Machine is here, and below is a tiny piece of the overall pattern.

Other avenues for exploration in this space that I think would be interesting include higher dimensional Game of Life (and other cellular automaton) models that explore 4D, 5D and higher dimensional space especially with regard to physical modelling and drawing parallels with the known physical laws that govern the evolution of our Universe. Adding evolutionary pressures via genetic algorithms into the mix would also be interesting with regard to exploring the maxima of computational landscapes.

How long it takes our developers and technologists to get from these abstract mathematical concepts to the fluidly functional physical artefacts that will be inspired by them is anyone's guess.

Update: 28th July 2010

And lo and behold Next Big Future unearths a molecular computer two molecules thick that has been developed based on highly parallel molecular switches running cellular automata. Whilst this is an early and sub-optimal version, this represents a solid proof-of-principle of cellular automata being implemented onto a physical substrate. There is still a way to go but as you can see the performance is already promising!

Thoughts on (Mind) Uploading

2010-03-14T13:30:00.000+10:30

Initiation

Mind uploading has always fascinated me, and as a transhumanist it is something that I look forward to doing in future when the technology is proven. However, I've often grappled with the mechanism by which this will be achieved and pondered which method I'm most comfortable with - and also whether my preference or comfort really meant anything given that the end result is the same. For those of you unfamiliar with mind uploading you will come to see this as a deep philosophical issue. But for me personally, I've realised that a slight tweak to one method ends up reducing it to parity with the other in any case and there seems little basis for my preference in any way.

The basic concept of mind uploading, of transferring one's mind into a computer has been around in various forms since 1971. From Wikipedia:

"Mind uploading or whole brain emulation (sometimes called mind transfer or electronic transcendence) is the hypothetical process of scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device. The computer runs a simulation model so faithful to the original that it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishably."

The benefits of mind uploading are many and significant. These include thoughts and information processing up to a million times faster than a normal brain and the corresponding acceleration of subjective time, the very real capability for massive intelligence amplification, consciousness splitting and duplication, mind melding, effective immortality and many others.

Background

There are a couple of different global research efforts dedicated to building the first enabling technologies that might be used as tools in future to achieve this. The first is destructive brain scanning, whereby a brain is frozen before being cut into very thin slices (less than the diameter of a cell) that are scanned or imaged by certain types of electron microscopes; each "image" is then stitched together by computer algorithms to provide a map of all the neuronal connections.

The second is fMRI (function Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and related brain activity imaging technologies, whereby large magnets enable blood flow and other parameters within the brain to me measured and imaged. Both technologies are being driven by exponentially improving development curves that see continual enhancements in imaging resolution, computational processing, and neural modelling.

Two prominent efforts that are driving towards brain mapping and or simulation are the Human Connectome Project, and the Blue Brain Project, which is aiming for a complete human brain simulation before 2020. It is now expected that in the near future these and related techniques will give rise to human brain simulations that run on a computer, and it is this that directly gives rise to the possibility of mind uploading.

Main Options

There are a couple of options for how you might go about uploading your mind into a computer in the future, with the first being based on the developments discussed above: opting for the destructive brain-scanning method. With this option you would fall asleep and your head / brain would be frozen before an automated and highly sophisticated machine progressively cut your brain into infinitesimally thin slices and scanned them with incredibly high resolution opto-electronic microscopes. Advanced image recognition algorithms would then analyse each slice and construct an accurate computational model of your brain that took into account every neuron, every synaptic connection and strength, and every neurotransmitter concentration - everything that makes you you.

Once this is complete sensory input from any source could be fed into your corresponding computational sensory circuits and you would be woken up. If you had opted for your original head to be repaired following the destructive brain scan and for the neuronal sensory signals (from your eyes, ears, etc) to be transmitted (wirelessly for example) to your new synthetic brain, when you woke up you wouldn't even know the difference. You wouldn't even know that your brain had been destroyed and was no longer inside your head.

The second option concerns the eventual development of tiny robots, the size of or smaller than a typical human cell, with nanomolecular components and an internal computer. Much like a normal organic cell, but tougher, more resilient, smarter, wireless communication abilities, better repair mechanisms, and able to interface directly with other opto-electronic devices. Such robots would have an immense range of beneficial applications; see for example Respirocytes and Nanorobotics. One application for these tiny robots would be in mind uploading. In this scenario your would simply receive an injection of neuronal-class nanorobots either into a vein (if they can cross the blood brain barrier) or your brain cavity (if they couldn't). Once in your brain each "bot" would target an individual neuron, then send out axons and dendrites to replicate each neuronal synapse that your organic neuron has with other neurons. The "neuro-bots" would replicate until each of your individual neurons was partnered with its own bot. The concept is best demonstrated by the following video:

Each neuro-bot would monitor the electrical firing pattern of its host neuron as well as its synaptic connection strengths and neurotransmitter concentrations. It would then replicate these features, and at this point its host neuron (indeed all of your neurons) could be disassembled or destroyed. You could be awake throughout this process and you would not even notice as your original organic brain was destroyed and your mind seamlessly migrated onto its new synthetic substrate, courtesy of the new network of neuro-bots processing native sensory stimuli. You could then decide whether to keep you newly synthetic brain within its old organic cranium, or else place it into a new body - real or virtual - of your choosing.

Uninformed Squeamishness? Misplaced Preferences?

I first came to be aware of these two options some years ago, and have always had a strong preference for the latter rather than the former. With the former, the destructive brain scanning, I always knew the the new me (my mind on a new synthetic brain-of-sorts) would be me in the sense that I would wake up and feel like me with all my memories and personality. But that doesn't escape the fact that my brain has been destroyed and from a technically legal point of view (current laws anyway) I'd be considered dead. Furthermore, isn't the process, at a basic level, simply making a copy of my brain, my mind, my consciousness? Do I die and a copy wakes up without knowing the difference? Would it be any different from going to sleep at night only to reawaken in the morning?

Of course, far more sophisticated philosophers, neuroscientists, and technologists have debated these scenarios and meanings in more detail than I could ever do justice here.

On an intuitive level it just seems that having an army of neuro-bots progressively simulate (assimilate?) your brain neuron by neuron on a cellular level is a progressive uploading process that preserves continuity of consciousness. But how important is that? We all undergo continual cycles of discontinuous consciousness every sleep-wake cycle, and arguably the information content of your brain, the information embodied by your brain ends up being exactly the same in both processes. Perhaps its because there is no conceptual "death" event, no line in the sand, in the progressive neuro-bot enabled mind uploading?

A Third Way

The third way that I (and others) can identify involves a modification to the neuro-bots such that they no longer simulate / stimulate their host neurons directly. Instead they merely measure the signals - inbound or outbound - at each synapse along with neurotransmitter concentrations and wirelessly transmit this information via nanoantennas to an external computer. Once these signals have been received by the computer, brain emulation algorithms similar to those used in the destructive scanning system model the neurons both individually and collectively. Once again an accurate copy is made, a copy that is updated instantaneously. The system might then allow signals from the synthetic brain-in-the-computer to be fed back into the organic brain in such a chaotic overlap that you wouldn't be able to tell whether your mind was on an organic substrate or a synthetic one. Indeed, your mind would be on a superposition of both organic and synthetic substrates and you wouldn't know the difference.

At this point it is a small step to disassemble or destroy your original organic brain altogether, while still wirelessly transmitting sensory signals from your organic body to the corresponding sensory inputs of your synthetic brain. You would then control your original body remotely (although your could place the computer containing your brain into your old cranium if you wanted to - not that you would) a la Surrogates or Avatar or Gamer and - just as easily - you could abandon the old body for a stunningly new real or virtual one.

An Enticingly Slippery Slope

One of the things that I like about the third method is that it results naturally from a slippery slope that many will find hard to resist, a slippery slope that begins with our collective demand for better and better entertainment media, better and better communications technologies. From High Definition movies, games, and other content, to HD 3 Dimensional entertainment, to fully immersive real and virtual 3D HD entertainment the end result of this demand for more realistic entertainment escapism is Matrix-like fully immersive virtual reality. Unlike the Matrix this will not be accomplished via a crude physical "jack" or "plug" through the skull. As Ray Kurzweil and others have pointed out it will instead be accomplished via the use of early neuro-bots that sit astride our sensory neural inputs. Early versions will allow sensory input only, for passive consumption of escapist fantasies, movies, and other content. Later versions will allow two-way communication between our brains, neuro-bots, and entertainment systems that enables us to navigate photo-realistic virtual worlds indistinguishable from our own.

From this point it is but a tiny, tiny, little step to full mind uploading.

Making Creative Associations.

2010-02-18T13:30:00.000+10:30

The phenomenon of creative associations gives me a real buzz. Whether the original and imaginative connections between disparate or related ideas comes spontaneously (more often the case) or through hard work and diligent research the result is the same: a very enjoyable intellectual surge that is deeply satisfying.

For example:

I was recently reading a summary overview of an article published in the journal Biological Psychiatry called "Dopamine Type 2/3 Receptor Availability in the Striatum and Social Status in Human Volunteers." The short, accessible overview can be found here: "Brain Dopamine Receptor Density Correlates With Social Status."

The study basically found that increased social status was correlated with the density of dopamine receptors in a certain region of the brain, both of which play a critical role in a person's reward and motivation characteristics. The authors went on to infer that people who achieve greater social status are more likely to experience life as rewarding because they have more targets for dopamine to act upon.

However, a day or two before I had just finished reading an excellent little book called "Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are" by Daniel Nettle, a Psychologist at the University of New Castle. This book concerns the 5 main factors of a person's personality, including the trait of Extraversion. To cut a long story short, what Extraversion really turns out to hinge on is the person's capacity to experience a lot of positive emotions like joy, desire, enthusiasm, and excitement. But not just more positive emotions in general, they also have more intensely positive emotions specifically. That is, those who score highly on Extraversion actually have a more intense subjective experience of these positive emotions than those who score lowly. People high in Extraversion actually get more of a positive kick when responding to either conditioned or unconditioned incentives presented by the environment. Responding in such a strong way to these incentives gives the quintessential extravert a lot of energy and drive to pursue these rewards.

A final quick point is that there is no ideal level of Extraversion to have or even aspire to. The benefits and costs of either high or low scores are finely balanced - good in some situations and bad in others. Your own level of Extraversion is mainly the result of a genetic lottery dealt at conception; to be happy we all need to try and find a niche in life that exploits our personal strengths and compensates for our individual weaknesses.

So, while reading this article online the knowledge on Extraversion that I'd gained from the book was still relatively fresh in mind. As soon as they reported "that increased social status was correlated with the density of dopamine receptors in a certain region of the brain, both of which play a critical role in a person's reward and motivation characteristics" I thought, well yes, this is exactly what you'd expect to find.

But when they went on to infer "that people who achieve greater social status are more likely to experience life as rewarding because they have more targets for dopamine to act upon" I was able to make the creative association to the knowledge gained in the book and think, well no, a more accurate and meaningful interpretation is that people with more dopamine activity actually have more intensely positive emotions in response to rewards and other stimuli and are therefore more likely to be driven to achieve greater social status. [And they do go on to make a similar connection later in the article]. Also, that just because these people "high in Extraversion" experience life as rewarding by achieving greater social status, does not infer in any way that other people - low in Extraversion for example - need high social status for a rewarding life in the same way. In fact there may be no correlation whatsoever.

While this was all well and good my emotional response after the mental buzz of insight and association when reading the article was one of mild sadness. I would ordinarily give such articles only cursory examination and it was only due to recent acquisition that the required knowledge was readily accessible. It made me think of all the thousands of other articles and conversations where I had missed making similar or more profound insights due to my very human, and very limited intelligence, understanding, knowledge, and memory.

I thought forward to the day when technological intelligence amplification not only lets us easily surpass such unfortunate limitations, but also grants us the ability to experience the subjective intensity of emotions that some of us take for granted. This will be in a similar way to those who are colour-blind being made able to subjectively distinguish and differentiate the colours red and green for the first time.

Accelerating Market Adoption and Technology Commercialisation

2010-01-26T13:00:00.000+10:30

David Rotman, from Technology Review, recently wrote a fascinating article called "Shoveling Water; Why does it take so long to commercialise new technologies?". For anyone involved in any aspect of technology commercialisation it makes for a very interesting and stimulating read. Rotman proceeds by presenting some of the key findings of the W. Brian Arthur book "The Nature of Technology". Some of the key points include discussions of the following.

Individual technologies evolve differently compared to technology domains, where a domain is a group of synergistic technologies that naturally fit together. Photonics is a domain, where lasers, fiber-optic cables, and optical switches are all individual technologies that manipulate light.

Quote: A technology is invented, Arthur writes. A domain "emerges piece by piece from its individual parts." . . . new domains are "encountered" by potential users who must try to understand them, figure out how to use them, determine whether they are worthwhile, and create applications for them.

The evolution and development of domains depends on improving the tools and individual technologies that comprise the domain. Critically, any gaps need to be identified and filled with the suitable technology for the domain to have any chance of successful commericalisation. The system needs to be complete - in the case of microfluidics, without the development and integration of suitable micro-valve technology the microfluidics domain or platform was always hampered with a slim chance of early commercial success. A technology platform cannot afford to be missing key pieces of its toolbox, otherwise users and developers are not able to create the applications that ultimately drive commercial success.

There is a strong need for technologists to invent the missing pieces that users want and developers need.

Despite this technology platforms or domains nearly always start out as great solutions in need of problems to solve. Even with a great technology domain in place - robust, developed, and devoid of gaps - it still requires users, developers, and even the original inventors to make creative associations between the technology and the problems that people or businesses have in order to germinate the seed of an idea for an application of the technology to solve these problems. Such associations are characteristic of abstract high-level thought and typically take much time or luck to stumble upon; so you can imagine the difficulty then, trying to doing the same for an incomplete domain with technology gaps.

This is one of the reasons for the lengthy timescales involved in successful technology commercialisation.

This brings to mind a quote I read somewhere, although I forget if it was by a Neuroscientist or Artificial Intelligence researcher:

Quote: A human is as stupid as a system could possibly be and yet still be generally intelligent.

This reveals a couple of things. Firstly, that natural selection drove the evolution of our species to the point of just achieving general intelligence and not much beyond that; enough to track social dynamics and hierarchies, exploit symbolic representation, basic capabilities of abstract association, and the propensity to develop culture due primarily to the clever ability to accurately imitate each other. Secondly, that this is a lower limit of general intelligence and that much greater intelligence is possible; we humans, with all our faults and biases, may be the only game in town on this planet but we're hardly paragons of intelligence.

What this means for technology commercialisation is that for the technology user, and even to some extent the application developer and technology adopter, the technology ultimately needs to be invisible. It needs to be made as simple as possible.

Make the technology package as simple as possible, demand as low a cognitive load on your user as is feasible and appropriate, provide them with a straight-forward and intuitive decision to adopt the technology.

Take a basic DVD player. It is very simple to use, you simply need to insert a disc in the tray and press play on the remote. But hidden inside is some pretty impressive technology holding together a deceptively complex system. There's the solid-state red laser and integrated optics for emitting light and reading the reflection from the disc that encodes the data. There's integrated circuit chips for processing the raw data, and video codec algorithms for converting the signal into one that the television can understand. There are other systems for the remote control, infra red optics, and power supply. Yet all of this complexity is hidden, invisible, and works independent of the user's level of technical knowledge. The system needs all of these pieces of technology to be present, integrated, and working together; the absence of any one piece renders the whole unit (and other pieces) functionally useless.

So too with any other bit of technology that is in the process of being commercialised. If you're developing an entire system, you need to bring all the requisite pieces together. If you've only got one technology, one piece of the system then you need to develop, acquire, or bundle the technology along with the other necessary pieces. Failure to do so will necessarily result in your time-to-market expectations stretching indefinitely into the future. And if you cannot put a complete system together in some fashion then you should consider pitching, raising, and finding the resources that will let you do this or else abandon the technology altogether and move onto the next technology project where you might more meaningfully assist in a successful commercialisation.

You can lead a horse to water . . .

This all sounds straight-forward, obvious even, but it doesn't stop approaches to industry partners and developers with incomplete technology packages and the "hope" that a technology or product champion will be found within the company who is not only able to quickly make all the required high-level associations, but also see how the company or other sources can complete the unfinished technology and how this unfinished (and unproven?) technology will be better than anything else they and their team are working on and is worth dropping other projects and priorities for in order to pursue. This demands far too much of any individual.

All of this leads to a number of implications for different groups involved in technology commercialisation.

Most Intellectual Property produced, developed, and promoted by Technology Transfer Offices and Universities will be advanced pieces of technology that comprise solutions or parts of solutions looking for a problem. This is particularly true of serendipitous technology development resulting from fundamental scientific research, which is arguably itself an underfunded endeavour. Standard operational due diligence processes might start to include mapping out these ill-defined problems and identifying the other pieces of technology (gap-fillers), no matter where they reside, that may be used to bundle or build a complete technological system - private companies might also find this approach useful if it is not already being employed.

Research and development within Universities that pursue single, stand-alone, advanced pieces of technology should be encouraged and supported when done as part of industry-sponsored research facilitated by good industry engagement on the part of either the researcher or Technology Transfer Office. In this case there is immediate buy-in and support by the industry partner that is driving the solution of a well-defined problem with a piece of improved technology that can be immediately integrated into a complete system.

Patent firms are well-placed in terms of existing expertise and data resources that can be used to determine whether a technology they have been asked to protect is platform or domain in nature (many patents) or merely represents a single technological piece of the problem.

Patent firms can expand their service offering with their search capabilities to help connect a client's piece of technology to other complementary patents that might be bundled together to fill a raft of technology gaps to produce a complete system.

Venture Capitalists and other institutional investors should also consider these issues when investing into start-ups and other high-growth-phase companies. When investing into a company trying to commercialise a good, although ostensibly incomplete technology package it should be with the goal of acquiring or funding the additional components that are required to fill the gaps.

At the end of the day it is all about shortening the time to market for new technologies, thus improving the return on investment for those involved and the standard of living for end-users and society as a whole.

A Beautiful Truth Of Your Existence

2010-01-11T18:56:00.000+10:30

Imagine one of the hottest days you have ever experienced, with the sun beating down on you, sweat seeping from every pore, and your laboured lungs taking short hot breaths of air. Now imagine how much hotter it was when you scalded yourself under hot water, how hot the water bubbling on the stove-top is and how quickly you might cook if you immersed your hand in it. Scale this up by a factor of 10 and you are now plunging your hand into molten lava, which would rapidly strip the flesh from your bones – although your pain response would disappear along with your nerves. Go further, now 6 times as hot, and your hand is rapidly vaporised by the scorching plasma on the surface of the sun. Increase this by 2 million fold to temperatures found in the core of the sun and it is now so hot that aside from being instantly vaporised the hydrogen atoms in your hand begin to fuse. But this is nothing compared to the earliest epochs of the Universe, which were much, much hotter. At this early stage the infant Universe was an unbelievably hot, dense, opaque plasma that rapidly expanded along with space itself, before cooling and allowing gravitational instabilities to draw large clounds of hydrogen and helium gas together to form the first stars.

In this earliest epoch of star formation the first stars were many times more massive than our own Sun, and lived short turbulent lives by burning their hydrogen fuel at a far greater rate. In general stars form from a massive cloud of hydrogen gas being compressed under its own gravity. Over time the cloud rapidly gets denser and denser, causing the central portion of the cloud to build greater and greater pressures and ever higher temperatures. Under these conditions the atoms jostle and collide with each other at a tremendous rate until electrons are once again stripped from atoms and the atomic nuclei form a plasma. But gravity is inexorable and continues to crush the plasma into astronomical densities. Nuclei in the centre of the plasma, under the most extreme conditions, collide at an fantastic rate and temperatures sky-rocket up to 15 million degrees Celsius. Finally, gravity forces the nuclei to overcome their natural repulsion and the nuclei begin to fuse; it is at this point that a star is born.

The nuclear reactor deep inside every star fuses hydrogen nuclei together to create helium nuclei. This is where Einstein's famous E=mc² equation comes into play because the mass of a helium nucleus is slightly less than the added mass of the two hydrogen nuclei that were fused to create it. So where does this mass go? The answer is this missing mass is converted into the energy of the resulting helium nucleus; the nucleus literally gains kinetic energy from the converted mass and moves at a faster velocity. These faster moving nuclei cause a further increase in temperature within the core and this energy is transferred outwards through successive layers of the star to the surface. This process maintains the surface layers of a star like our Sun at a temperature of about 6,000 degrees Celsius. The energy produced in the core is finally emitted as light, both inside and outside the visible spectrum, which beams out into space to bathe any planets or other objects in the vicinity. Despite the violent conditions within the core of a star, or perhaps because of them, stars are held in a continual, stable equilibrium. Gravity seeks to crush the star down to nothing, while the energy generated by the nuclear reactions seek to literally blow the star up. Should gravity crush the star further, the pressure and temperature in the core increase and so make the fusing of hydrogen nuclei more frequent; this causes the temperature to rise further, seeking to expand the star against gravity. Conversely, should the nuclear reactions produce an excess of energy and expand the star, the pressure and temperature within the core will drop and so make the fusing of hydrogen nuclei less frequent; this causes the star to contract.

Once our Sun has consumed all of its freely available hydrogen fuel, the nuclear fusion reactions will slow, and gravity will squeeze the core to yet higher pressures and temperatures. At a certain critical point, around 20 million degrees Celsius, the helium nuclei that have been produced previously will overcome their repulsion and also begin to fuse. Now a carbon nucleus is produced for every three helium nuclei that fuse, which is again lighter than the joint mass of the nuclei that formed it. The significant levels of nuclear energy produced again serve to maintain the star in a stable equilibrium between expansion and collapse. At this stage, in order to off-set these higher internal temperatures the Sun will expand massively into a red giant star, so massive that its outer layers will engulf the Earth. The Earth's atmosphere and oceans will be boiled away, its crust will melt, and eventually our home will spiral deeper into the dying Sun and be vaporised. The final stages of the Sun's life, as this lower-grade nuclear fuel is consumed, will see the Sun shed its outer layers and its core collapse. It will have become a hot, although faint, white dwarf star that will faintly radiate its captured heat for billions of additional years.

This fate does not await the most massive of stars however, especially the behemoths that were produced in the very early Universe. Such massive stars burn their nuclear fuel at a tremendous rate; their lifetimes are measured in the tens of millions of years as opposed to our Sun's 10 billion year life expectancy. By progressively burning through its hydrogen fuel to make helium, the helium to make carbon, and other reactions to make heavier elements, the star eventually ends up with a core full of iron. This poses a problem because further nuclear reactions with iron do not produce energy in the same way. Once this iron core reaches a certain size and the remaining nuclear fuel is too scant to provide sufficient energy, it simply collapses under its own gravity. This cataclysm produces shock waves that tear the rest of the star apart in the most energetic explosion known in the Universe: a supernova. The gravitational energy released with the collapse is such that the material in the outer layers is thrown off the core into space at velocities approaching the speed of light. For a brief time the dying star becomes as bright and energetic as its entire host galaxy.

Many of the massive stars that first formed in the Universe would have undergone this cataclysmic fate. But in a literal sense, with the death of stars comes life. For with these ancient stars living their lives quickly and dying once their cores collapsed into black holes or neutron stars, the resultant supernova explosion hurled most of the star's mass, everything other than the core, into space. This rapidly expanding gas cloud would continue to orbit its host galaxy until, due to galactic dynamics, the cloud slammed into another supernova remnant or gas cloud. The resulting shock waves and density variations would induce gravity to once again collapse sections of the mixed cloud into ever-denser pockets of gas.

But this time it is different. Whereas with the first stars there was only hydrogen and helium that went into their formation, this time there are heavier elements – created in the nuclear furnaces of the first stars – present in the collapsing clouds of gas. This time, with elements of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, iron, and many others in the hydrogen and helium mix, the process of star formation proceeds slightly differently. The central portion of the gas cloud still reaches pressures and temperatures sufficient to begin fusion of hydrogen once again and birth a new star, but in the outer portions of the cloud, rotating due to conservation of angular momentum, a small amount of the heavier atoms begin to clump together into tiny particles. The particles join up into grains, the grains into pebbles, the pebbles into boulders, and so on until large rocky objects orbit the young star, progressively mopping up more and more material, clearing their orbits of matter and colliding with one another to eventually form stable planets.

In our own solar system this process produced eight rocky worlds, the outer four of which mopped up the remaining hydrogen and helium in the gas cloud to become gas giants. The debris and off shoots of this period of planetary formation are still visible today. This includes the boulders and mountains in the asteroid belt that never had a chance to form a planet, the comets that continue to orbit the Sun and pass our skies with long regular periods, and the outer reaches of the solar system where billions of rocky icy fragments await; some of these, like Pluto, wander too close to Neptune and become trapped in warped orbits.

In a very real sense everything that we are familiar with, everything around us, everything inside us is incredibly ancient; over 13 billion years old. All of the atoms that make up our bodies, our homes, our planet, were once inside a massive star at temperatures of 15 million degrees Celsius. Indeed, heavier atoms such as carbon that are crucial to our existence did not exist without being created within the nuclear furnaces of massive stars that are now dead. Prior to this there was just hydrogen and helium produced in the early Universe and run through consecutive cycles of star birth and death. A long time ago some of the atoms in your body jostled up against the atoms in this computer inside an ancient star, and when this star died these same atoms were flung across space in a giant cloud that would eventually, after millions of years, form a new star, planets, and people. We are literally star dust, the debris of cosmic cataclysms. When our Sun dies the process will continue and some of these same atoms that make up your body and the screen you are reading will disperse throughout space in a giant cloud to await their next chance at forming a new star, new planets, and perhaps new life.

The Universe merely loans us our atoms for a short while before being recycled over and over again.

This is an excerpt from the draft of the first chapter of my book (in progress), which along with the Introduction can be found in the right hand column of I, Technophile.

2000 - 2010; A Personal Decade in Review

2009-12-06T13:45:00.000+10:30

As we approach the dawn of a new decade I couldn't resist looking back over the last 10 years at my own personal interactions with technology. Its been genuinely interesting thinking back over the years at the things I used to use and at the developments that indirectly touched me. One of the main things that became even more apparent after this period of reflection was that everyone pretty much takes the improvements that we've seen for granted. Continual improvement seems to be expected by most people who are at once unsurprised by it and yet fail to appreciate what it means for this to continue in the same fashion into the future.

I guess we all, myself included, take the improvements in our technology for granted, despite the fact that such improvements are - when you think about them - pretty damn amazing. The intriguing thing about the current rate of progress is that it is well within the time-span of comprehension of most people, and this is one of the key factors in the "take-technology-improvements-for-granted" attitude. And all this means is that something new gets released, people have time to take it in, to adjust, to incorporate it into their lives, get frustrated that its not good enough, and then wait for the next improved iteration.

Technological progress however, is accelerating, and has been shown to be exponential. This "time-span of comprehension" that I've called it - between one improvement and the next - is getting shorter, and at a faster and faster rate. I'm fascinated to see what happens when technological progress breaks this barrier, when people genuinely struggle to comprehend the improvements taking place, have no time to take it all in or to adjust, let alone incorporate it into their lives and get frustrated that it . . . well, just frustrated.

But enough of that. Lets get onto the observations of technology in everyday life over the last decade . . .

Mobile Phone
I actually managed to keep every mobile phone I (have ever) had over the past decade, starting with my first ever phone, a Sagem RC920 that I think I received in 2000 (2001?). All five phones are shown below.

The Sagem and the next phone, the Motorola (cheap as part of a Coca-Cola sponsorship!), were both pretty basic with green back-lit monochrome LCD screens, text only input / display, no more than half a dozen lines that I used on a pre-paid basis via a GSM-only network. I distinctly remember thinking just a year before receiving the first one, as mobile phones were slowly being taken up by people, "Why do people want a mobile phone? What would you use it for?". Yet even by the second phone I remember thinking how cool it would be to have a phone with a camera and music player built in; I had absolutely no idea what magical abilities my phone would have at the end of the decade. At this stage the mobile was mainly for SMS; voice calls were very expensive.

The third phone, Sony Ericsson Z800i, corresponded with a substantial increase in disposable income and my first mobile phone contract. This was in early 2005 and the Z800i clam shell flip-phone included Bluetooth, 1.3MP camera with LED flash, MP3 music player, expandable memory card slot (that I loaded with a then-impressive 512MB card - see below), better games, basic video calling, themes and improved phone navigation and function. Two years later in 2007 saw the upgrade to the Sony Ericsson K800i, which boasted a 3.2MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash, improved software and games, better video calling, and that I loaded with a then-midrange 1GB memory stick (see below).

Finally, two years later, earlier this year in 2009 saw the upgrade to my current Xperia X1. The X1 connects to the latest high-speed networks, maintains the (now mid-range) 3.2MP camera, has Wi-Fi capability, has a dedicated web browser, can access the web via mobile or Wi-Fi, Skype VoIP software, detailed high-resolution touch screen, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, GPS with Google Maps, can stream videos from YouTube, and is basically a mini-computer with a 528Mhz dual core processor, 256MB RAM, 3D graphics and upgraded storage of 16GB (memory card below). The most significant advance is the reasonably reliable Internet access with Opera Mobile browser, which provides near 24/7 mobile access to our species' knowledge pool and, in theory, much greater processing ability via the cloud. I would argue that this 24/7 mobile access to the web is the most significant advance in the last 10 years; the entire world's knowledge base, accessible at your fingertips, at a whim.

Above are the upgraded memory cards that I've bought for my last three phones, starting with the 512MB for the Z800i. I can clearly remember the older, larger memory stick (earlier in the decade) that came bundled with an early digital camera - it held a whopping 8MB, upgradeable to 64MB or so. Now my phone carries a memory stick the size of a finger nail that holds 16GB - 2,000 times as much.

Camera
I received my very first digital camera towards the end of 2000, a reliable little unit from Kodak the EZ200 boasted 0.3MP and 4MB of internal memory that could hold 64 "High" quality shots or 128 low quality shots. It also functioned as a web cam and due to the preset shutter speed and aperture, produced some interesting, sometimes artistic, looking shots. It had a view-finder and I couldn't actually see the photos until I'd downloaded them onto the computer. I later upgraded one Xmas to a Sony Cybershot, before relying on my Sony camera phones, and finally upgrading again this year (mid-2009) to the Sony Cybershot DSC-T90. See below for the EZ200 on the left and DSC-T90 to the right.

The T-90 boasts 12.1MP, a three inch LCD touch screen over most of the back, Carl Zeiss optics, 4x optical zoom, records HD movies in 720p, and storage capacity that I expanded to 8GB (didn't think I'd need the 16GB). That's 40x better resolution and 2,000x the storage capacity (4,000x if I'd gotten the 16GB). Not to mention smart software for auto-focus, image stabilisation, filters and effects, editing, macro, flash, and fully adjustable ISO and other settings.

Land Line Telephone
Remember how important the land-line telephone was. At the start of the decade it was critical, and you home telephone plan was typically broken up into local, STD (national), international, and special call categories, along with those expensive rare calls to mobiles. International calls especially were still pretty expensive at this stage - you had to make sure you didn't talk for too long.

Sure, wireless handsets for the home telephone line made their appearance during the decade but last year I disconnected my home telephone line altogether - no more paying Telstra a $30 line rental fee each month. I now have a Naked ADSL2+ connection to the Web and thats it. I handle any telephone calls with my Mobile via a generous allowance in the monthly plan, the VoIP phone connected to the router that functions like - and can connect to - other land-line phones at very cheap rates, and finally via Skype where you can get international calls to landlines for about 2 cents per minute.

Computer
I bought my first computer, a bulky desktop x86 clone, in 1998 and this was the one I used throughout the early part of the decade. It had a 350Mhz processor, 64MB RAM, 6GB HDD, and a 56Kbps dial-up modem. Looking back and comparing to what we have today these old systems quickly seem antiquated. 2005 eventually saw an upgrade to an Acer laptop, and again in 2008 I upgraded to a Dell laptop - Inspiron 1720. The Inspiron that I'm writing this on has an Intel Dual Core processor running at 2.5Ghz (~14 times as much as the original box), with 4GB RAM (~62 times as much), and 500GB HDD (~83 times as much) and integrated Wi-Fi / LAN - and this is by no means a top-of-the-line system anymore.

Its funny thinking back. You can't really imagine at the time what you would possibly use all that extra processing power and memory for. But invariably you do. The laptop handles tasks like video editing and compiling with ease, things which would have caused the old system to crash. Such improvements are also more clearly demonstrated when I think about my old desktop and new mobile phone: 350Mhz/64MB RAM/6GB HDD/56Kbps Web versus Dual 528Mhz/256MB RAM/16GB/(up to)14Mbps Web. I carry something far more powerful than my old desktop around in my pocket.

Television
At the start of the decade I bought a huge and heavy 59cm old CRT television. In the interim I went through a 40" (100cm) Bravia LCD and upgraded again this year to a Sony Bravia 46" (115cm) LCD television with full 1080p, 100Hz, 100,000:1 contrast, DLNA, and 4x HDMI slots. Such a screen and high-resolution display was pretty much unimaginable for me back in 2000. But I very rarely watch TV on it even with full digital broadcasts now available and the old analogue signals being shut off; its used mainly for movies, video games, and surfing the web. My entertainment and media consumption is now delivered primarily through the Internet and gaming.

Gaming
I had a Playstation and Nintendo 64 in 2000. The Playstation boasted a 33(sic)Mhz processor, 2MB main RAM, and no on-board storage. My current Playstation 3 has an 8 core 3.2Ghz processor, 500MB RAM, 120GB storage, BluRay, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth wireless controllers. The PS3 is unimaginably more powerful than its predecessor, and the games show it. Grand Theft Auto 10 years ago was a 2-dimensional affair with a birds-eye-view on pixelated cars, buildings, and people. Fast forward to now, and Grand Theft Auto 4 is an immersive 3rd-person shooter / action adventure game rendered in full 3-dimensions in a living, breathing city. Downloading whole games and new content for other games from online through the Playstation Network is something that massively changes the gaming experience and was unimaginable to me 10 years ago. The Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 also join the PS3 next to my TV.

Internet
Its very hard to remember back to what my web-usage was actually like 10 years ago. I got my first email address in 1998 - a hotmail account - and I'm pretty sure this was the only mechanism to keep in touch with people online, although there were also very basic IRC chat rooms with pretty basic interfaces and settings (see image below). There were personal websites hosted by sites like Geocities, but most content was created by companies and governments. Pages were static with basic button and frame layouts, and filesharing / downloads were almost unheard-of. I remember trying to watch / stream in short videos from Atom Films and it just wouldn't work. Pages and content trickled in over the 56Kbps dial-up connection.

Now . . . now we have full broadband access, web pages are dynamic, you can edit and leave comments that stay on the page and can been seen by other viewers. Its very quick and easy for anyone to set up a webpage or blog or other website of interest. We all have facebook and I keep in touch with people primarily through facebook via private messages, instant chat, and spontaneous & interactive free-flowing discussions on people's pages, links, status updates, etc. Email seems almost exclusively for more formal or official uses now. We have dynamically generated pages in Flash, Ajax, and Java, P2P clients for distributing and downloading files such as songs, movies, and programs. Think of a song, jump online, and you can have it in 2 minutes. Browsing through 100s of photos on facebook, Flickr, or official sites is as easy as click-click-click. Streaming of large video feeds is routine and easy and has transformed how we use the web - it has certainly had an impact on the way I access entertainment and is the main reason I watch very little conventional television. Youtube even released a HD streaming option recently for uploaded videos. Can you imagine not being able to get a song / movie / information / keep in touch via facebook instantly and at a whim?

Health
At the end of 2000 I graduated from my undergraduate Bachelor of Science Degree - majors in Genetics and Biochemistry. During the year the first draft of the Human Genome was published to much fanfare and given the majors I was undertaking at the time we addressed and covered this issue in great detail (A human chromosome map is shown in the image below). The project to sequence the first genome had cost $3 Billion. Now, if you're part of a large study you can get your genome sequenced within weeks for between $5,000 and $10,000. The biotechnology industry has exploded over the past 10 years and the holy grail of a $1,000 genome is not far away.

In 2000 you went directly to your doctor if you had a problem. Now it's routine and common for people to research their symptoms and problems online in great detail before going to see their doctor (I certainly do), and in many cases being better informed with more up-to-date information than the GP.

What I Look Forward To:
When you take a moment to reflect and take stock of the last 10 years, it becomes readily apparent how much progress we've made. While I don't want to speculate on what I'll be using 10 years from now, in 18 months a few things I look forward to are:

Upgrading my phone to the SE Xperia X10, running a 1Ghz processor, Google Android operating system, 8MP camera, and loading a 128GB microSD card as storage which will be able to hold pretty much every personal file I have.
Buying a tablet PC with solid state drive running Google Chrome OS for use at home and any other Wi-Fi access point.
Upgrading the 46" Bravia TV to a new 3D (Bravia?) TV - using stereoscopic glasses in the home - and playing the latest 3D movies and games. Can't wait for Grand Theft Auto 5 in 3D!
I also think facebook is more than capable of moving into Skype territory, adding voice and video chat to its currently text-based instant messaging client.

And not long after that:

With the completion of the National Broadband Network it will be great being able to stream in ful 1080p HD videos / movies online.
I'll be having my genome sequenced - how cool is that!?

What about you? What are you looking forward to over the next several years?

Interlinked Technology Developments: You Can't Have One Without The Other

2009-11-17T16:51:00.000+10:30

Most of you will remember the scene well:

Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader finally encounter each other within the flight hangar of the Death Star. Circling each other slowly, pacing over the pristine floors with the sounds of sirens and blaster fire nearby, they draw their light sabres. Darth Vader speaks in his [now iconic] deep raspy voice, "I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master."
"Only a master of evil, Darth." is the gentle yet firm reply. Red and Blue light-sabres ignite, and with their distinctive buzzing hum the duel begins.

So what is wrong with this scene?

The thing that stands out, simply, is Obi-Wan's age; he looks OLD. Watching the movie, we live vicariously through the characters in a technologically advanced civilisation that spans a galaxy. Their technology is so advanced that they have unimaginably dense sources of energy to power their space ships, plasma guns, and light sabres, they can literally warp the fabric of spacetime to travel faster than light, they have robots and AI's with at least human-level intelligence, they have prostheses and nanotechnology sufficient to merge artificial limbs to human nervous systems and make artificial skin look like the real thing, they have human-like robots able to carry out all forms of surgery, and biotechnology systems able to revive people nearly dead from exposure.

And yet they still haven't conquered aging; maybe they all choose to grow old!?

This of course, is one of the reasons that these movies belong to the genre called "Science Fiction". The directors and writers behind these movies come together to tell stories, to build characters and relationships that are interesting to audiences and individual movie-goers. The world setting or theme upon which these events take place is considered an important but secondary consideration. These worlds might provide some interesting story points, and plenty of opportunities for juicy wow-factor visuals with modern computer graphics, but they typically take only one aspect of technological development into the far future and leave all other aspects behind.

For this reason these worlds will always be fantasy worlds.

No one aspect of technology ever gets left behind for long, especially not while another aspect accelerates ahead for decades or centuries. One of the reasons for this is that the tools that are developed to advance one aspect of technology invariably have other or modified uses in other fields.

In the example set by our own civilisation all areas of technology are advancing in parallel, with many areas piggy-backing on information technologies and so increasingly experiencing exponential growth. Recent amazing advances in stem cell therapies and tissue engineering are matched by just as impressive developments in molecular self-assembly and robotics.

Another glaring instance in the Star Wars example above is with Artificial Intelligence. Once robots with human level intelligence are created they won't stay static at this level; within a decade of achieving this, artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence - and human creativity - many times over. And after 1000's of years, apparently, of utilising their high-technology to colonise the galaxy and build countless "droids" with human-level intelligence, they're still unable to reverse the ravages of age; which we are on the brink of doing so ourselves.

Other examples abound. The computational requirements for the Star Trek teleporters are phenomenal; once you've achieved this it should be trivial to make a back-up copy of yourself or repair any wound or aging by taking a trip in the teleporter and having it rearrange a few atoms. And with that level of computation, and historical development, you'd easily expect the Enterprise to have an artificial intelligence on board whose capacity would easily surpass the combined capabilities of all the ship's crew by many orders of magnitude, more than enough to entrust to the ship itself all possible missions and activities. The fact that you actually have a human pushing a lever to drop out of warp speed beggars belief; this is something that would require pico-second timing - a nanosecond here or there could easily send the ship crashing at hyperluminal velocities into a planet.

I find that the more I learn about science and technology, the more I struggle to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the movie (supernatural horror flicks long ago lost any effect on me). And while I sometimes feel that I've lost something precious because of this, later reflection reveals that I have gained so much more; knowledge-based imagination reveals that we are along for the ride to a far richer world with a future much more exciting and impressive than any Sci-Fi movie can begin to convey.

Even Transformers is populated by supposedly advanced alien robots that have mastered nanotechnology but have intelligences barely better than a human, and are replete with suspiciously crude human vices and behavioural traits. The Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Matrix, and Surrogates movies all have their own inconsistencies in parts.

But of course, sticking strictly to realty - e.g. watching two featureless space ships zoom up to each other, have a millisecond long silent conversation, then zoom off again - wouldn't exactly make for a riveting viewing experience. Or would it? If there is one truth you can count on, it is that future technologies will make life more amazing and interesting than you can presently imagine. So maybe it is merely a failure of the imagination and of creative implementation on the part of movie production teams? I don't know, and in any case, I digress.

The point is this: you can't have one without the other. We're not going to have warp drives without advanced energy-storage materials, which we won't have without advanced nanomanufacturing capabilities, which demands that our control of matter including organic cells is sufficient to overcome most physical ailments, both of which piggy back on and enable reverse engineering the brain and building advanced artificial intelligences. And we're not going to have an artificial human intelligence without avoiding an intelligence explosion that (provided it is benevolent) - as a minor aside and trifling concern - spits out solutions to every conceivable problem that our civilisation currently faces.

This relates to the final, more serious point that I want to make, which concerns the tendency of most people to project the status-quo, the current state of affairs into the future. The illusion of the permanency of the present. This is confounded by most people's ignorance of both the accelerating (exponential or non-linear) nature of technology development, and of the parallel nature of technology development across disparate fields - as discussed above. It reveals itself when people either cannot see the massive changes that are coming due to technological change, or when they - like the Sci-Fi movies we consume - have a blinkered view of technological change and only see (modest?) advances in a single technical field.

We might call this technological blindness or technological tunnel vision.

Because of this we are innundated with sensationalist warnings of over-population by 9 billion people by 2050 causing the death of billions due to wide-spread food shortages . . . with no consideration of the food production technologies that are under development. Or catastrophic warming due to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels . . . with little or no consideration of the accelerating development of solar panel technology and production systems (to name one example), or that of artificial carbon sequestration methods (to name another). Or that the rainforests will have all been chopped down, and waste & landfill will be poisoning ecosystems by 2050 . . . without considering advances in new materials and recycling / biodegradation technologies. Or that our populations are aging into metabolic disease and senility . . . without considering biomedical developments of the future.

Or, my favorite, that governments will have no money for pensions & Superannuantion (401K) funds might be insufficient to support retirees in 2040 . . . without considering that we are almost certainly guaranteed a different economic model for our society by then, and probably a vastly different social contract too.

By cultivating an awareness of the accelerating, parallel nature of technological development, we can all be better informed about what the future will likely hold. This can't help but lead to better decisions, better allocation of scarce resources, and better policies for countries and corporations. Perhaps we might all share a communal optimism for a better future if we all knew we can't have one without the other, which could well lead to a higher standard of living sooner rather than later.

Predictive Modelling of Materials

2009-10-27T12:45:00.000+10:30

Might smart modelling software accelerate the development of novel substances and grant our technological civilisation the "Super" materials that we so desperately crave?

It appears as though we finally have the tools available to begin to quickly and accurately model the atomic structure of bulk materials and to predict their associated properties. This represents a significant advance and one that I'm surprised took so long to achieve.

A recent article from NewScientist introduces the work of Chris Pickard (University College London), who developed a computer program that models the bonds and forces between different atoms in a material and predicts the properties that the material will have. His latest program has performed very well in predicting crystal structures. Genetic algorithms have also been applied to modelling materials and predicting their properties for a number of years now. As an example, Artem Organov (Stoney Brook University, New York), used improved genetic algorithms to predict that, under 3 million atmospheres pressure, pure sodium turns from a red metal to a transparent insulator; subsequent experiments confirmed that this is indeed what happens. I've always been a big fan of genetic or evolutionary algorithms and their ability to rapidly find creative solutions to problems that a person would rarely discover.

The current suite of material modelling programs appears to be restricted to the user specifying the type and general arrangement of atoms and then predicting what the bulk material will have under different conditions in different environments.

The real promise of these programs however, or at least of the gext generation of programs, is to be able to do the reverse. To specify to the program the properties of the material that you would like, and then for the modelling program to explore a large computational space and determine the ideal atomic identity and structure required for a bulk material that would possess such properties.

For example, some properties that we may like to specify would include room-temperature superconductivity, ultra-hardness, super-efficient (90%+) solar to electric energy conversion, optimised metamaterials for optical manipulation and control (e.g. invisibility materials, super lenses, etc), opimised engineerable self-assembly materials (improved DNA origami), extreme-capacity hydrogen storage materials, etc. With enough processing capacity such modelling software would quickly be able to determine the ideal atomic structures that are required by a material in order to possess such properties.

This step is essentially the easy part; the hard part is actually being able to manufacture the resulting materials in economically useful quantities.

But with such concrete and easily visible goals for people to aim at, mobilising the resources required to design suitable manufacturing and processing methods should be easy. Do you really think an Intel or a Toshiba wouldn't throw $50 Million at the R&D required to produce such materials? The pay-off, the ROI on such a project would be astronomical.

The next steps should be:

1. Provide a significant boost to basic research in this area of computational materials modelling, spread over the leading groups around the world. This would enable further development of these algorithms, and also importantly, go towards proving that the predicted properties of materials that these programs make are true across every variable and property.

2. The programs should not only predict, from basic principles, that HgBa₂Ca₂Cu₃O_8+δ superconducts at 138K, but also determine the transition temperature and other properties of many other variants (that are manufacturable with todays methods but haven't yet been so) that can then be made and tested.

3. The best performing, most accurate programs can then be used to predict the elemental structure and composition of all the "Super-materials" that our present technological civilisation desires; things like room temperature superconductors, extremely efficient solar cells, etc, as mentioned above.

4. Significant commerical development funding would then come on board to design the manufacturing processes required to produce the materials in bulk, with subsequent commercialisation improving the standard of living for all.

5. Later generations of the predictive modelling programs would optimise other aspects of these materials such as manufacturability, durability, etc.

6. As computational power increases and with the addition of specialised AI capabilities, the breadth and scope of these programs would increase substantially. Instead of just designing the optimal elemental configuration of materials these programs would additionally design these into components and then into fully integrated systems and products and even the new tools required to manufacture these items; hopefully just in time for nano-molecular manufacturing.

The power of such an approach cannot be overstated.

UPDATE: Nov 7th 2009

Two new computer programs that accurately predict how molecules interact with metals have appeared in Science. Click here for the summary.
A new method has been developed for calculating the motions and forces of thousands of atoms simultaneously over a wider range of time scales than previously possible. The method overcomes a longstanding timing gap in modeling nanometer-scale materials and many other physical, chemical and biological systems at atomic and molecular levels. Featured in ScienceDaily.
New computational modelling for predicting the interaction of hydrogen with surfaces is described here.

Convergence of Ubiquitous Video and the Boardroom

2009-09-04T22:39:00.000+09:30

Online Video Security Services like Ugolog could offer an excellent avenue for recording the proceedings of corporate board meetings - but would video intrusions into the board room ever be tolerated?

You might have heard that ubiquitous video is the future of the Internet. Then again with the rise of services such as YouTube, Vimeo, hulu, justin.tv, Ugolog, and others you'd be forgiven for thinking it was already here. It was Ugolog in particular that caught my attention after recently completing the Company Directors Course run by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD).

Ugolog's catch line is: "Online Video Surveillance. Watch what happened at home." and has been referred to by some as a niche application of the broader video streaming service offered by justin.tv. The premise is simple. Turn any camera into a webcam (they show you how to do this), or use any existing webcam, for example the one integrated into your laptop, and enable web access with a Ugolog account, then activate the system when you leave the room. If any movement is detected the camera will start recording, streaming the footage onto Ugolog's secure servers for which you - and only you - can later access with your password. Someone could even steal the camera, your computer, and router, and you could still go online and see what had happened. But how does this relate to corporate board meetings?

Australia has one of the most comprehensive and detailed bodies of Corporations Law of any country. This fact, and the extensive demands and liabilities placed on Australian Company Directors was made abundantly clear throughout the AICD's seminars and course materials. Directors can be held personally liable for debts incurred by a company, and face civil and criminal penalties for breach of their fiduciary duty and obligations to the companies on whose boards they serve.

The discussions that are held and the decisions that are made by Directors during a board meeting are typically recorded in the minutes of the meeting. A few days after the board meeting when the detailed meeting notes have been summarised the minutes will be sent around to all Directors for them to review, approve, and possibly add any major points they think might have been missed. In this way a "true and accurate" record of board conduct and decisions made is established.

Should there be any board misconduct or company trouble that occurs in the future then courts will thoroughly scrutinise these records as part of the process to determine what happened, and also to assess the consistency of statements provided by individual Directors. Most boards of most organisations have always written down and recorded the minutes of board meetings. There are some boards however that have taken to making audio or video recordings of their board meetings, and this is where services like Ugolog's can come into play.

Ugolog offers an excellent avenue for recording the minutes of board meetings. In the Ugolog system a webcam would broadcast video & audio of the entire board meeting onto Ugolog's secure servers. Account security could be mandated - by company policy or federal law - at one of 3 levels.

The first level is where the board polices itself: a company has an account and password access that the Chairman or other Directors can use to view board meeting proceedings and manage files. The second level involves the company's auditors: individual directors can access the company account to review meetings during their tenure if needed, but account management (e.g. deleting records) can only be done with the approval of both the auditor and the board - both of which have passwords, both of which are needed to effect account changes.

These first and second account types are still vulnerable to manipulation by dishonest conduct regarding the alteration or deletion of records. The third level involves Ugolog automatically sending a copy of all records to secure servers controlled by the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) for example in Australia. Such a situation would need to be backed by changes to federal corporations law. Given the government situation Ugolog would lose exclusivity or monopoly rights to this service and would instead be one of several registered video security services allowed to integrate with storage systems run by various national corporate regulators.

Once up and running, companies offering such video security services might begin integrating other software services / features such as - given continuing improvements in voice recognition - automatic production of voice transcripts of all recorded meetings.

Advantages of the system include:

Significant time savings. Directors need only activate the webcam to record the meeting and can then later review the proceedings or the automatically generated transcript. New Directors might also be able to review recent meetings to better get up to speed, understand board dynamics, and make good contributions sooner.
Transparency. Board processes can be opened up to the public, shareholders, employees, etc. if needed and to the courts when required. Any existing veil of secrecy is removed.
Certainty of proceedings. There is absolutely no ambiguity concerning who said what or when and what was decided. Such records would be incredibly useful in court - for both prosecution and defense - and would be free of any omissions or manipulations.

Disadvantages might include:

Loss of board room privacy. But arguably the door remains closed, and privacy remains intact should things go well. It is only when things go bad with an unexpected collapse that the privacy is lost and the door thrown open for all to see. And this is what happens anyway as courts delve into every record that can be obtained; board room videos would make things much easier.
Conspiracy meetings. A board with secrets to keep might broadcast "dummy" meetings whilst having the real meetings elsewhere. This seems possible but unlikely. There is nothing to stop people from trying to circumvent the system if they wish, but the penalties for doing so - when caught - would be worse for such deliberate and blatant misconduct.
Director competency. Would an electronic eye in the boardroom lead to a reduction in Director confidence and competency? Perhaps. But the majority of Directors might be reasonably expected to adapt quite quickly to the change, especially given that there are some companies and other organisations that already record video & audio of all board meetings.
Private company holding critically confidential corporate data. This is an important one; trusting a private company to keep secure the board room proceedings that are to remain private unless dictated by the board or demanded by a court. This is similar to the issues faced by companies considering outsourcing critical functions to external software-as-a-service providers and the cloud; many companies are pressing ahead with this regardless. One option would be to use the technology provided by online video security services but stream and store the captured files to a trusted organisation with highly secure records management such as a bank or certain government departments . . . or some other organisation? Or else one of these organisations develops its own online video security service independently; the Department of Justice in each individual state might store such records for example.

This, of course, would represent the arrival of "Big Brother" in the board room. How would directors act, knowing that someone was looking over their shoulder, that a future court room could be viewing the proceedings? Would major corporate collapses like Enron, HIH, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, etc have happened if the directors knew they were being watched? If a meeting was missed or recording of proceedings was "accidentally" forgotten perhaps doubts, questions, and suspicions might be raised? Despite the resistance that might be expected to such a development is it the case that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to lose"?

Is it possible to mount an argument that such a system would not be in the best interests of the company and its shareholders? If we cannot mount such an argument then are we not morally, ethically, and legally obliged to rigorously implement such a system?

None of us want to see our wealth squandered away by incompetents, cowboys, or crooks. As shareholders ourselves, whether through pension funds or otherwise, we all want the Directors of the companies that we part-own to be held to account and to act with care and diligence. At the end of the day the vast majority of Directors take their fiduciary duties and responsibilities very seriously and strive to conduct themselves in a responsible, ethical, and legal manner. Despite these facts many if not most Directors would not wish such intrusion into their boardrooms, although there is nothing to stop an individual secretly streaming a board meeting live with the own mobile device via justin.tv or Ugolog. While implementation is unlikely to occur in the near future due to significant cultural, political, and legal factors, perhaps the arrival of ubiquitous video in the board room might prevent future corporate collapses from happening?

Raison d'etre

2009-08-19T16:25:00.000+09:30

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