According to a number of business magazines and a small feature in Popular Science, the future will belong to analysts who can collect, organize, and comb endless reams of data, looking for hints of the future. This is by no means just speculation. There really are companies out there trying to predict the newest fad from blog posts, social networking sites, consumer and business purchasing habits, and media buzz. But as someone who would technically be qualified to take on such a job and try to read the digital tea leaves, I wonder if sifting through tweets and status updates on Facebook would actually yield anything interesting or actionable. Sure, there’s always a very high signal to noise ratio, but certainly, the signal must be there for those know where to look, right? And maybe it is, but the big question here is whether you even know what signal you’re expecting.
Now, trying to predict the future with statistical analyses isn’t quite like breaking out the Ouija board and trying to become one with the spirit of the average representative of your target demographic. You’re working with an actual data set and writing all sorts of tools to better parse it in a search for insight. But the problem is that a very large data set about consumer behavior really only tells you what consumers like at the moment and the emerging fads of the day rather than alert you to what’s going to be really popular and marketable in the next six months to year, giving you enough lead time to develop and test your product, as well as its marketing. The idea of looking for statistical patterns in complex data sets has been tried before on the stock market with very mixed results. Pretty much all systems that billed themselves as excellent predictors of where the market will move tomorrow, or that week, have failed. Even the best, most treasured, and most sought out systems you’ll have to pay thousands of dollars to order, are generally very conservative bets almost guaranteed to slowly go up over time and outperform virtually any get-rich-quick scheme which relies on predictable trader behaviors, fair and equal distribution of relevant information, and total transparency, things the market doesn’t have.
Ok, the stock market is one thing. Why couldn’t we use a stream of consumer data to make predictions? The prescient wonk approach to data analysis assumes that humans are more or less rational, and what they do and say now, can be extrapolated into the near future. However, we’re far more messy than that, and what we say in public isn’t always what we do in private. No data mining is going to explain why the very same people who post a long winded rant on their personal blogs about the demise of good literature own, and love, every single book of the Twilight series. Or why so many mediocre, widely panned creative works gain the success they do. All you’ll see are the double standards and contradictions writ large across your data set, tampering with all your significance tests. In effect, you would be trying to predict the actions of people who change their minds day in, day out, quickly embrace and abandon trends and fads based solely on how they feel over the last several months, indulge in guilty pleasures, and jump on bandwagons depending on how close they are with certain friends, whose relationships can change at any moment. Considering these challenges in trying to predict the human psyche, it may be easier to simply try and ride the current fad rather than try to catch the future by the tail, or just try and launch a trend of your own to ride the resulting s-curve of demand.
Science fiction writer Ted Chiang did a good deal of research into artificial intelligence, particularly the kind of general knowledge, omni-AI system which I've been labeling completely uneconomical whenever I mention it in any practical context. And in a post about his inspiration on the subject, he outlines exactly why a custom, learning, adaptive artificial intelligence system designed to do anything and everything is bound to be grossly impractical, not just from a philosophical standpoint, but from a logistical point of view as well. It takes far too long to actually build it, then train it to do whatever it is you want to do. Considering that even humans can't do everything and at some point in time we need to specialize in a rather narrow area of skill and expertise, you'd have to devote decades upon decades of training your fantastic machine to do something really impressive.
Teaching machines is really nothing new, and there are plenty of ways to get robots and computers to make the decisions you need them to make, at least for problems involving things computers are built to do, things like building complex probabilistic models and crunching numbers. But when it comes to things humans can do as organisms, computers tend to sputter. Without the mechanism to learn very quickly through a repeated pattern of trial and error in each area they try to master, they may find a way to move around in a lab maze, but not so much in the real world, where they deal with new stimuli and interference they simply weren't designed to work around, since it's so common sense to us, we forgot to account for them. As Chiang summarizes…
[N]avigating the real world is not a problem that can be solved by simply using faster processors and more memory. There’s more and more evidence that if we want AI to have common sense, it will have to develop it in the same ways that children: by imitating others, by trying different things and seeing what works, and most of all by accruing experience. This means that creating a useful AI won’t just be a matter of programming, and although some amazing advances in software will definitely be required; it will also involve many years of training. And the more useful you want it to be, the longer the training will take.
That's pretty much spot on, with an added bonus of noting that simply speeding up training sessions isn't an approach we could take with general artificial intelligence. Though he's wrong that we're not even close to the kind of robot that could walk into the kitchen and make you eggs in the morning (because we already have a few that fetch beer on command), and his reasons behind why speeding up trials wouldn't work has several major problems (we can't compare processors to neurological limits of our bodies), his initial statement is a valid one. Trials in the real world take a certain amount of time and you have to be thorough to train a robot to do what you need it to do. The experiment has to be set-up, the code compiled after the latest tweak, and the execution itself has to take a certain amount of time. Afterwards, you have to do an analysis of what went right and what went wrong, tweak the code, debug and re-compile it, re-set your experiment, and so on.
And all this is costing some very serious cash. While you spend decades whipping your AI into shape, who's to say that your funding won't be cut in another financial disaster? What happens if people who originally built the system leave to do other things? Who's going to be in charge of all this general training that will last more than some people's entire careers? It's much easier and cost-effective to build specialized intelligent agents which are trained to do a few specific tasks quickly and extremely well. Then, maybe at some point we could combine them into something impressive, bringing together mobile system, rules-based and probabilistic AI, and natural speech recognition software to help us process huge reams of complex data on the fly, but even there, our hypothetical homunculus would have to be trained to focus on specific tasks rather than try to be an omni-app that needs non-stop training to be keep up with the humans around it.
[ illustration by Felix, aka ReginaldBull, story via John Dupuis ]
When we last mentioned computer scientist and researcher Jaron Lanier, he wrote a vague rumination about the field of artificial intelligence, reminding us that technology was only a tool to help promote his manifesto of a book, You Are Not a Gadget. Now, he penned a short essay at the Chronicle of Higher Ed which follows the same basic ideas as his column in the NYT, but with less coherence and more passion, saying that just using the web to share, consume, and spread information, be it by Twitter or Facebook, basically means that you don't exist as a human until you step away from the computer and turn off your phone. As he lashes out at random YouTube videos, the use of files for storing data, laments that creativity as we know it is in a stall, and shudders at the thought of the Singularity concept, he's beginning to mine deep into Nicholas Carr territory.
But, of course, unlike Carr, or the highly technophobic McKibben, Lanier is an accomplished inventor whose efforts played a major role behind what we know today as virtual reality. If anyone should be sober and aware of the limitations of our technology, it should be him. This is in part why his Chronicle's focus on how today's brand of profitable, splashy, pop sci futurism advanced by Ray Kurzweil seems so bizarre. The Kurzwelian interpretation of Vinge's paper is a trendy fad and while it's fun to ponder about the possibilities, ultimately, it would never really happen because rather than plan for our grand future with focused, sweeping construction and infrastructure projects, people tend to respond to their immediate needs and just leave it at that. Now this is not to say that some forms of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology or even devices capable of making us a bit more machine than human will never be built, because they absolutely will. However, we are not going to be living in a future where we simply leave our bodies at a whim to zap around virtual worlds as per the ideas behind iconic cult hits like The Matrix and Ghost In The Shell.
And not only is Lanier despairing against futurists who have always been around, dispensing predictions and insisting that the future we've all been expecting is on the horizon, but he's presenting transhumanism as an affront to the idea of human specialness, reducing humans to nothing more than parts to be swapped out or replaced, and minds as little more than nodes in a global computing and information network, a network that produces nothing more than mediocrity. To call this far fetched would be mild, to say the least. Sure, we know that we're imperfect mortals, but if anything, transhumanism is all about saying that humans aren't just cogs, gears, and levers in a complex evolutionary machine, but that we're special enough to start changing who we are, disregarding nature's limitations on our bodies and minds. That may not happen for a very, very, very long time, if it will happen at all, but we are slowly starting to counter nature's blows. And when it comes to Lanier's lamentations on how we seemingly cease to exist as humans when we use social media, and that the web's primary export being mediocrity and snark, it seems to me like it's time for a brief psychology lesson.
The number one reason why we use social media today isn't to somehow negate our existence, but to shout about who we are to the world if we can. Be it blogs with novel-length posts, or short exchanges on Twitter, a key component of social media relies on how many people are watching you. Likewise, sites like Facebook simply answer our innate need to communicate with others, an evolutionary drive that helped us build entire societies and civilizations. And today, since pretty much anyone can be seen or heard, and talent in anything creative is rather rare in relative terms, of course the vast majority of what you see online will be hum-drum or mediocre, and if that hum-drum mediocrity gets enough views, someone will try to make a profit from it, falling for the good, old bandwagon effect. Unlike Lanier claims, we are finding new musical styles, concepts in film and video, and new generations of writers and thinkers are honing their skills just like they always had. But in an age in which our technology enables anyone to audition to be a singer, writer, or pundit, there's simply far more material to sift through until you find a gem. If the Renaissance had Twitter and YouTube, history books would be filled with lamentations of how hard it was to find great artists and scientists in the noise.
This is why I'm really not a fan of books, essays, and treatises that look back at what we've accomplished over the decades, focus on the downsides, and spend nearly their entire content on lamentations and derision. It's not as if for the last 5,000 years humanity was producing amazing art, music, and science, then suddenly the invasion of lolcats and viral YouTube videos sent our species into a spiraling cycle of mediocrity. We've had a very long history of having to search for the next world changing invention, or for the next great thinker and just because we're not aware of all the embarrassing fads of the past, it doesn't mean they didn't exist, and I think we could safely assume that they were every bit as bad as what Lanier bemoans. The best we can do is keep on looking for The Next Big Thing in creative and scientific fields, and hope that those who write history books in the future will be kind enough to whittle it down to just the meaningful ideas and inventions…
Oh those scientists with their constant corrections. Slightly more than a century ago, they said our planet and the entire solar system was a few hundred million years old, then they said it was 4.56 billion years old after fiddling around with radioactive isotopes in asteroids and meteors. Now, they’re changing the age of the solar system once again. How can we trust them after decades of jumping around and constant re-measuring? So how old is our solar system supposed to be now? About 4.5682 billion years? But wait, that’s a correction of only 300,000 to 2 million years from the date we have now. What’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is that this date solves a small controversy in planetary science and allows scientists to even further refine how to better measure the ages of astronomical objects based on radioactive decay, and how to prepare their samples.
While we can say with great certainty that our solar system is between 4.56 and 4.57 billion years old, getting to a more accurate number was a little tricky. Ordinarily, chemists measure the amounts of isotopes formed from the decay of more unstable elements. Since this decay happens at a very steady rate, you can compare the relative amounts of isotopes in a sample of a meteorite and come up with an accurate age. But there was a bit of a snag with dating the isotopes of lead, aluminum and magnesium. The latter two seem to be several million years older than the lead, which is a little odd to say the least. So a team of geochemists decided on a serious look into those troublesome lead isotopes, particularly 206Pb and 207Pb, formed by the decay of two isotopes of uranium. And they weren’t just going to take another measurement. They used another meteorite and washed it with a cocktail of acids to remove every last bit of contamination they could before testing.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, the results from the lead isotopes now match up with the older dates, showing that the readings of aluminum-26 and magnesium-26, were right, and that the other lead isotopes were probably contaminated with something that slightly offset their ages during measurements. Problem solved. But wait, you may ask, will we have another correction to the age of the solar system in the future? After all, if we’re now discussing one, maybe another technique will yield another estimate? And it very well could. However, I would hesitate to label this 300,000 to 1.9 million year refinement to a 4.568 billion year old system a correction and posit that it was in fact just a refinement necessary to understand how the infant solar system formed, but not very meaningful to those of us who are little more than informed laypersons on the subject. For us, the age of the planet or the solar system hasn’t actually changed at all in absolute terms, and we can just as confidently say that Earth is slightly over 4.5 billion years old. And continue to make fun of those who disagree, especially if they try to use the headlines about this refinement as evidence that “scientists keep changing their story.”
See: Bouvier, A., et al. (2010). The age of the Solar System redefined by the oldest Pb–Pb age of a meteoritic inclusion Nature Geoscience DOI: 10.1038/ngeo941
[ illustration by Mario Iliev ]
We know that black holes can grow to become absolutely enormous in size, tipping the scales at billions and billions of times the mass of our sun. The numbers involved make the gravitational monsters in question very hard to visualize, and pose a big mystery. Did they form from the remnants of the first stars and just kept on growing, or did they coalesce from primordial clouds of gas and dust and were in effect, born this big in the first place? After all, a black hole with a billion solar masses should take up most of our solar system in size, spinning an entire galaxy around it. To get that huge would mean it survived a lot of collisions, eating far more than its share of stars and gas in a process that would’ve taken billions of years. And yet, young galaxies have immense black holes seemingly right off the bat so slow and steady growth might not have been possible. To get an idea of what might’ve happened at the dawn of the universe’s first supermassive black holes, we could turn to a simulation which considers what happens when two young, calm, and gas rich galaxies collide.
Billions of years ago, as the galaxies were closer together, frequent collisions were almost inevitable. Even in our relatively calm, more mature universe, galactic collisions happen all the time. So take a galaxy with a core made up of what we’ve generally thought galactic cores were made of, millions of solar masses of humdrum gas and dust, and slam it into another galaxy just like it. Since galaxies can just pass through each other due to their low density of stars and planets, they would first move past each other’s positions in space at the time of impact (so to speak), then, trapped by each other’s gravity, they’d recoil back. Oscillating back and forth on a timescale of millions of years, the gas at the core of each galaxy begins to heat up and churn as these cores merge. When all that gas and dust collapse under their own gravity and heat, they weigh far too much to form new stars and instead, collapse straight into a giant black hole, overcoming the degenerate pressure that keeps many supernovae from swallowing themselves into a gravitational ghost. The giant new black hole quickly starts to feed and lights up the settling galaxy around it into a quasar. So far, so good.
This simulation ran by astrophysicists from the University of Zurich, the University of Chile, and The Ohio State University, fits very neatly with the timescales and the observational evidence for supermassive black holes at the dawn of inflation and galaxy formation. Now, the mystery isn’t exactly solved, but this is a great example of when computer simulations really do pay off in stark contrast to the last much publicized simulation, said to explain Jupiter’s small core with a super-Earth impact. Here we know the initial conditions (hot, dense, and a lot of gas-rich proto-galaxies relatively close to each other), the end result (quasars with huge black holes at their cores), and the approximate time frame for all this to happen. The simulation’s data gives us a possible, and well supported, scenario from which we can derive hypotheses to be backed up or refuted by observation in the future. In other words, what we have here is great, computer-aided science in action. According to what this simulation tells us, the first satellites designed to detect gravitational waves should be able to pick up an impressive number of ripples making their way across the cosmos from these sudden and violent gas cloud implosions. And if that’s what they ultimately confirm, we know the simulation may be a viable theory.
See: Mayer, L., et al (2010). Direct formation of supermassive black holes via multi-scale gas inflows in galaxy mergers Nature, 466 (7310), 1082-1084 DOI: 10.1038/nature09294
[ illustration by Michel Merza ]
Tetris is one of the most popular and beloved games of all time. Created by a programmer in Moscow at the twilight of the USSR, it spread across the globe in countless variations and styles, still delighting players to this day. I remember playing it obsessively as a kid and even as an adult, I’m still a huge fan. And I promise it has nothing to do with my birth in the former USSR either. But both my love for Tetris and my background just blended together into a mix of bizarre emotions when I saw the following tribute to the game and the history of Russia in this video featuring Dan Woods of the UK neo-folk band Pig With The Face Of a Boy, summarizing the wild ups and downs of those who lived and still live in the playgrounds of oligarchs and authoritarians. As the tune continues, its pace speeds up, just like the game, for that added touch of respect to its inspiration.
While this gem of a music video is masterfully done, there are a few small quibbles I should raise. Today, the notion of free enterprise isn’t rejected in Russia or any of the other Soviet territories. However, because those who ended up holding the best assets from an empire that collapsed after decades of incompetence and an out of control kleptocracy at every level of society, prompted by constant shortages of just about everything, are frequently either close friends, relatives, and allies of those who gave away these assets, the benefits of free trade were concentrated at the very top of the social hierarchy. So while former Party officials and their friends schmoozed international corporations, important and exporting just about everything from sugar and candy, to exotic fruits and assault rifles from the Red Army surplus, most people were mired in poverty and those who tried to start their own businesses better make some friends up high, or face mafia-style shakedowns for the right to keep operating their business, and fraudulent investigations into their personal affairs. And if they got tough with their intimidators, they might come home and find themselves face to face with a hitman.
So yes, there is free enterprise in Russia for those who are well armed, well connected, and on friendly terms with the government. They’re allowed to do pretty much whatever they want, whether it be to have themselves appointed as governors, buy a soccer team in the UK, or trash hotel rooms all over the world while partying in the most decadent ways they can imagine on their private planes. And hilariously enough, while some highly hyped and popular pundits wail about the United States turning into the Soviet Union, or Russia in a bit to stir up the good, old Cold War propaganda and Red Scare fever with which their primary audience of 40 to 60 year olds, what they don’t seem to understand is just how far away the U.S. is from anything even remotely trying to resemble Russia back in its USSR days, or today. Imagine if when the Democrats came to power, they rigged elections to whittle down the number of Republicans in the Senate down to 10 or so, and to less than 70 in the House, then proceeded to pass anything and everything they wanted in rapid succession while ignoring every single Republican lawmaker, making sure that state sponsored news networks never even talked to them.
Instead, what we have is a media world ran by huge, private corporations, one of which gives a million dollar donation to the Republican Party and employs a cadre of pundits to scream Red-baiting gloom and doom at the soothing volume of 90 decibels day in, day out, and a political process ran by a party which saw one of the biggest majorities it ever had, and yet allowed it to whittle away while it was single-handadley focused on its monster healthcare bill that managed to span more than 2,000 pages and address almost none of the basic causes for soaring healthcare costs rather than seeking transparency, accountability, and truly studying why the nation has such a dysfunctional medical system. The U.S. is nowhere close to what Russian was then or is today, neither politically, not financially. There are alarming decreases in upward mobility and a substantial discrepancy in income between managers and rank and file employees that simply aren’t sustainable in the long run, but these phenomena are nowhere near those far too many pundits fear and far too many partisans love to chant. Likewise, as long as there’s real competition in politics and new presidents aren’t nominated by the outgoing one, the U.S.’ political system is far from heading down the Russian road.
Dan Burnett needed a job and he recently spotted a help wanted ad that sounded great on the blog of David Briggs. The job was that of a homeopathic doctor, promising convenient hours and great pay, about £68,000 per year. Funny fact was that this post was coming at the expense of 500 real doctors with far less convenient hours and whose treatments and recommendations actually had to come with evidence behind them. But it’s a job and Briggs needed one. So he decided to send a resume and a cover letter which opened with…
Whilst I have no formal medical qualification, I believe that I am ideally suited for the job of handing out sugar pills to unsuspecting patients on behalf of NHS Scotland. My PhD level scientific training and 6.5 years postdoctoral experience means I know lots of scientific and biomedical buzz words with which I can bamboozle [my] prospective patients like “medical biomimicry”, “postconditioning hormesis”, “quantum entanglement” and “the placebo effect.”
As a fellow scientist and skeptic, Burnett also decided to apply for the job touting his neuroscience experience as another excellent source of pseudoscientific jargon and word salad science. Although he admits that he’s primarily interested in a position that requires, you know, real science, he writes that he’s more than happy to try one falling into the non-scientific category just to shake things up…
I am keen to apply for this position as I am currently seeking work in the Scientific field. However, I am also considering non-scientific work, and the position of Doctor of Homeopathy seems ideally suited to the latter category. I am a qualified doctor of Neuroscience, so am aware of many long and complex words which I often use to convince people I know what I’m talking about, when in reality I am just exploiting their ignorance for my own amusement. As such, I feel I would be an ideal candidate for the post of doctor of homeopathy. Ridiculous claims that I have successfully convinced people are true include the following…
What? I’m not going to give you the entire letters, so follow the links and check them out. Both are a doozy and absolutely dead-on in their assessments of what a homeopath needs to be able to do to keep his job. Dan’s formal paperwork is also properly impressive so give it a look see if you have the chance. Can you imagine neither of them even got an interview after demonstrating the kind of impressive pseudoscience they could lay down on unsuspecting patients? What, did British homeopaths finally watch what Mitchell and Webb had to say about them and realized the comic duo was actually making fun of their woo?
Aliens and artificial intelligence, or looking for traces of alien artificial intelligence as SETI is considering, is not a topic exclusive to American and Western European nations' popular science blogs and news. A little bit farther east, Russian newspapers are just as interested in publicly exploring some advanced futuristic ideas, including astrobiology and transhumanism. One column in particular, written by physicist Alexei Timoshenko for his science section of GZT.ru, and borrowing an image from this blog with full credit to set the tone, asks a very familiar question to all those of us who've been following high tech futurism while discussing Shostak's suggestion of looking for alien machinery around young stars and black holes.
If stars, planets, galaxies, and other intimate objects observed by scietnists evolve on timescales of millions of years, alien life should evolve rather quickly and change much more radically. It took humans 5,000 years to go from the first cities to the first circumnavigation of the world, while less than 500 years passed between discovering America, to the first lunar landing. What will happen over the next 500 years? Or what about the next five billion?
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an English version available, so my apologies to readers who want to review the column for themselves but don't speak Russian. However, you may note that right above this quote is the exponential evolution chart created by Ray Kurzweil and taken to task on this blog a number of times. A blurb next to it says that the explosive nature of human evolution makes it difficult to predict when or if an alien intelligence evolves. So before we go any further with the question above, let's make an important note. When talking about human evolution, we're really talking about rather humdrum stuff. True, we are evolving and with our populations nearly reaching their theoretical peaks, the process is happening faster than ever before. But our evolutionary changes over the last 10,000 years include such thrilling and spectacular adaptations as being able to handle more diets, greater resistance to more bacteria which are traveling the world with us like never before, and various adaptations for living at very high altitudes. Hardly riveting stuff for non-biologists.
One of the most profound ways in which far too many people tend to look at human evolution involves the odd idea that biology strives towards something, and to evolve means to improve rather than to change. After too many years of bad science writing, sci-fi movies that equate more evolution with bigger brains and telekinetic powers, and New Age concepts taken from Theosophy and Rosicrucianiansm, it's an idea that stuck firmly in our minds, but it's absolutely wrong. There's no evidence of an evolutionary leap between the first sailors who traveled around the world and the builders of the first city. Likewise, there's been no actual change in mental capacity between Enlightenment thinkers and the engineers who build spacecraft and robots to explore other worlds. The only change has been a steady accumulation of knowledge gathered by trial and error. The rapid acceleration of our abilities and technology is a cultural process driven by key inventions and discoveries that allow us to explore brand new areas of the universe around us, not by biological progression.
So with that in mind, let's answer Timoshenko's question. What will happen in the next five centuries is totally up to us. We could remain politically inept about science and education, or we could realize that science is the key to a better future and commit serious resources to exploration and discovery. We could fall into dark ages during which religious fundamentalism and political sloth take over our lives, as has happened quite a few times during our supposedly illustrious history, or we could privatize space travel and enjoy vacations on the settled, industrialized Moon. But the key thing here is that it's our choice. Evolution won't build us a brand new interstellar probe. We have to build up on the thousands of years of learning that are fueling today's new ideas, roll up our sleeves, and get to work. If it took us just five hundred years to go from completing the rough maps of our planet to walking on another world, let's see how little it takes us to accomplish something even more impressive. A lot of things are within our reach. We just need to want to reach them badly enough.
[ illustration by Pavel Dedik ]
Whenever the person most associated with transhumanism and futurism in the media, Ray Kurzweil, makes another grand pronouncement and finds himself the target of critiques by skeptics and experts, there's a very interesting thing that happens on a number of Singularitarian and transhumanist blogs. We're diplomatically told to keep in mind that Ray is very smart, very well read, always does his homework, but that his predictions can be a little too aggressive. Then, we're just as politely given a much more realistic estimate and asked to consider how far technology has come today and how likely it is we can build on it in the future to do all kinds of amazing things. The underlying message I've gotten from several prominent Singularitarians like Vassar, Anissimov, and transhumanists like my Skeptically Speaking counterpart, George Dvorsky, seems to go a little like this: there's no need to focus just on Ray's proclamations and encourage the media to do the same.
Just to drive that idea home, last week George made it a point to list some prominent, sober transhumanists and futurists on our second episode on the subject. And if you missed the show, he posted the complete list on his blog along with a very unambiguous thesis that paying far too much attention to Kurzweil is distracting people from a community of serious thinkers and researchers interested in the topic. Michael Anissimov was quick to put up a link and reiterate the message that there's much more to high tech futurism then Kurzweil's last sound bite and it would be a good idea to make note of those cited by George. And you know what? They are absolutely right. While many people today get their first exposure to Singularitarian thought from Ray and his books, he didn't create the concept. The idea that at some point in the future, something profound enough to change the world as we know it thanks to technological advances accumulating at an exponential rate was the brainchild of computer scientist and sci-fi writer Vernon Vinge, more specifically, from a vague paper he wrote for NASA in 1993. Kurzweil simply capitalized on these ideas and wrote several books.
Now, of course, whenever Ray comes out on stage and drops a profound whopper like his recent claim about reverse-engineering the human brain in a million lines of code according to his to obscure numerology, an exercise comparable with scanning an alphabet into a computer and reproducing the Oxford Dictionary, there is a need to defend him to some extent lest the core idea of trying to simulate the human brain on a computer at some point in the future be discarded as ridiculous. So the futurists and transhumanists say several vague and murky positives, then proceed to correct him because they know that neurologists are actually busy trying to reconstruct the human brain in supercomputers so they can try to find potential treatments for Alzheimer's, tumors, and ideas for how to repair brain damage. It's almost like an exercise in damage control as a media hound who managed to become a symbol of their movement to the public at large goes around promising a path to immortality by 2045, recommends taking hundreds of supplements a day to "reprogram the body," and essentially runs his own version of transhumanism, Singularity® Inc., as a lucrative business. The more coverage he gets in the media, the more books, alkaline water, vitamins, and lectures will be bought and so it makes perfect sense for him to continue being a media hound.
But on the other side of the movement are sober scholars who are genuinely interested in what's going on in the world of cutting edge technology, noticing potential trends and ideas. They are the ones you're going to be meeting at Singularity Summits, just like Skepchick's Sam Ogden discovered for himself this year. As Ray's streak of grabbing headlines with bold, often unrealistic claims which seldom show what his fans say are the nuanced, profound explorations into complex technical topics for which he's best known, continues, there's a certain urge among the more realistic and far less known Singualritarians to make their voices heard over the sensationalistic proclamations of a media messiah prophesying the Nerd Rapture. And that would be a good thing because it seems that nowadays, Ray needs Singularitarians and transhumanists a lot more than they need him. After all, to them it's not about making money and hoping to live forever, but simply exploring what's possible and rejecting the ideas that we should be afraid of technical progress, or that we are to surrender to the forces of nature, while making philosophical and epistemological excuses for doing so.
Just when I try to get out of this topic, PopSci pulls me back in with its review of Seth Shostak’s paper about potential swarms of intelligent alien machines roaming the cosmos and why we should be pondering how to get their attention. The idea is that as advanced civilizations decide to reach out into space, something that would be extremely limited by their resources, they may decide to do what we want to do, and send robots on interstellar journeys. Since these machines would likely be very complex and autonomous to a pretty high degree, they should cluster around young stars and galactic cores to gather new materials to fuel themselves and replicate to explore more of the cosmos, and hence, these stars should be on our watch and contact list because communicative aliens and their intelligent machines may be on the lookout for attempts by others in their galaxy to get in touch with radio signals, lasers, and even physical devices floating in interstellar space.
With all my respect to Dr. Shostak, though, I wouldn’t want to invest all that many resources into trying to talk to alien machinery if I were in his place. It’s not that his idea is unsound, quite the contrary. But the problems are in the details of the subject matter at hand, where they typically lurks. First and foremost, we need to consider a number of design challenges in building interstellar, autonomous explorers and some of the subsequent limits on what they could do. And the same goes for the notion of trying to broadcast binary signals to the alien machine that might be on the receiving end. Even using binary signals, we can’t make two different programs on the same computer talk to each other without using a set of agreed upon standards and translators which decode messages sent using these standards, and turn them into data programs could use. So what are the odds that alien probes that never even heard of our communication standards could catch our binary symbols and decode them into something meaningful to whoever or whatever wrote their software? I’m having a rather hard time imagining what an alien bot would make of an XML file.
Furthermore, who says that alien computers even have to use binary code and logic gates? They might use a pseudo-evolving hardware which uses analog signals, or shielded organic components capable of cognition to guide them. And that’s just what we could think of on our planet, using the grand total of one intelligent life form with less than a century of experience with computational devices using digital code for reference. What could a real alien civilization think of? Without encountering one, we would have absolutely no way of knowing, much less composing messages that could be processed by technology stacks which might have been built across the galaxy from each other, with different goals, ideas, and potential capabilities. We may be better off looking for machines trying to beam their programming across worlds to travel between stars at the speed of light, bouncing between otherworldly computers and satellite towers to the next outpost, tens of thousands of light years out of our reach and incredibly difficult to pin down with any degree of certainty.
Don’t get me wrong, It would be amazing and inspiring to confirm a signal from an intelligent alien entity, even a computer, but since we’re trying to reach extraterrestrials in the real world, we have to be very realistic about our methods and their potential to pay off. Trying to communicate with technology we can only visualize based largely on our own efforts in the computing realm, seems like a non-starter to me. Unless of course, the alien machines in question are smart enough to recognize a deliberate pattern, any deliberate pattern at all, send it back with their own little twist on it just to let us know they heard us, and report back to their masters. Then we may actually be getting somewhere, but we should probably look at potentially habitable worlds where they’re most likely to be exploring potential new habitats and areas of interests for the species which created them in the first place. After all, if we’re looking for rocky planets which could nurture life, why wouldn’t they focus their efforts on the same thing rather than send their machinery to exotic and distant locales for fueling?
[ illustration by Carguin ]
