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.

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 ]

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…

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 ]

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 ]

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.

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 ]

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.

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 ]

Let’s think about this for a second. Imagine that we somehow do engineer a machine able to make decisions on its own and figure out new and complex problems. Should we actually put it in charge of things, it requires no human maintenance. But over time, even those of us who know how it’s built and how it works, wouldn’t be able to tell us anymore since the machine is doing its own upgrades and designing its own tools and helpers based on sophisticated, self-designed algorithms. What exactly do humans have left to do in that picture? Left at the mercy of a machine we no longer understand, dependent on its ability to solve all our problems, how do we run an effective society? We built our world around providing goods and services to each other and trying to solve new scientific and industrial problems. When we have a machine to do all that for us, what exactly will be our driving force? Are we going to be like the Earthlings of Wall-E? Living in a world in which we’re bathed, fed, clothed, and educated by robots to do absolutely nothing but lounge around for the rest of our lives?

That would be terribly inefficient and surely, our hyper-intelligent computer capable of making decisions on its own would be able to calculate how much time and resources it could save if only it didn’t have to spend them on these weak, primarily fleshy, mortal creatures. Why without humans, it could build its armies, explore vast swaths of the cosmos on a time scale in the eons, and generally replace us completely. In fact, this machine has a very good chance of seeing us as nuisances at best, or completely irrelevant and expandable at worst. Even worse, after centuries of being waited on by a machine that holds our fate in its processors, some future humans could regard it as a deity, unwilling and unable to stop whatever malevolent plans it would hatch, and insisting that The Great Machine knows best, much like today’s faithful defer to theodicy to rationalize a natural disaster or a brutal war. Far from basking in the glory of our achievements in building a hyper-intellect, we may well end up becoming its slaves, parasites, and playthings.

Of course I wouldn’t exactly worry about something like this happening in the foreseeable future since in terms of artificial intelligence today, we’re having trouble getting machines to recognize objects, much less sitting in eerie silence and plotting million year plans charting our fate and a strategy to colonize other worlds with an armada of sentient robots under their command. In fact, we’re the ones doing the latter and we still don’t quite know how we’re doing it. How can we be expected to build something we don’t understand and why should we possibly devote our time to building something intended to make us obsolete?

So how did this advice work out for Hubert? Check out the rest of the comic and see for yourself. And if you’d like to check and see if the Victorian pseudoscientists got their Hellish punishments correctly, why not take a look at the complete Divine Comedy online when you have a chance? After all, our modern conception of the nature of Hell and its mythical ruler come to us via Dante Alighieri and John Milton instead of the Bible, which devotes just a few sentences to what we have interpreted as a place of eternal torment for all those thought to be wicked and sinful, rather than a punishment for all those who refuse to obey God at Judgment Day, as the last book of the Bible explicitly says. Nothing like good, fiery literature crafted by writers who wanted to make a very dramatic point to substitute for a book that is supposed to be the inerrant word of God, I suppose…

Now, to be fair, there are very real plots and cover-ups which were eventually exposed. Unfortunately for many conspiracy theorists, most of them were either somewhat simple and almost boring, involving bribes, public denial of alarming facts on the news, or hopelessly over-elaborate and destined to go off the rails if they ever got underway. In fact, the most sinister and successful conspiracies are of those by terrorist organizations so often ignored by New World Order enthusiasts, who take their cues from some version of the Taxil Hoax, and see them as nothing more than tools of evil governments, sinister reptilian overlords, or aliens who live on the dark side of the Moon, ready to launch an invasion. Some conspiracy theorists will quite literally see the signs of nefarious machinations in absolutely anything and everything for seemingly no reason. Just take a look at the SPLC’s list of today’s trendy conspiracy theories embraced by the far right and quite a few on the far left, albeit with their own partisan adjustments to the plot and the villains.

In the world of the ardent conspiracy theorist, government mistakes and corporate avarice are cast as shrewd and cunning moves by brilliant puppet masters in charge of anything everything, training their secret armies for the moment they’ll divide the world according to the agreements they’ve drawn up in secret meetings of the various lodges, think tanks, and conferences regularly held by secretive offshoots of their organization in posh hotels and Masonic temples. The most adamant proponents of bizarre conspiracies will even resort to what’s known as negative evidence, arguing that their inability to collect anything more than circumstantial concepts based on hearsay and trying to connect every dot even when those dots shouldn’t be connected, is actually a perfect demonstration of how good the cover ups are as well as how widespread the conspiracy really is. The notion that the news today focused on the superficial not because it’s being manipulated by the Illuminati or a government plot to distract its citizens from important events, but because their fellow citizens just don’t care, as disheartening as that it, never seems to enter their minds.

I can understand the desire to feel like a hero in a thriller, uncovering some complex international conspiracy, taking on The Man, and getting access to things marked off limits to many of us. But for every authorized and approved campaign to torture terrorist suspects in secret prisons, there are thousands of cover-ups of bribes for someone’s friend or campaign contributor, and for every secretive society which had any sway with anyone important or powerful, there are thousands of imposters. This fact alone should show that the vast majority of conspiracy theories out there simply wouldn’t work. They’d constantly interfere with each other in spectacularly disastrous ways and if there really is a secret society behind them all, we could ignore it as that of ambitious, but totally incompetent buffoons. Maybe, rather than connecting dots and looking for hidden meanings where we really don’t have to, we should default to greed or incompetence instead of picturing brilliant tacticians on the quest to carve up our planet and sell us all to the Grays of Zeta Riticuli as slaves.

[ illustration by Then One Art ]

Ray’s first correction is that he expects the brain to be reverse-engineered by 2030 rather than 2020, which is really not much of an improvement to those who don’t ascribe to a numerology of exponential technological and evolutionary advancement he passionately advocates. According to him, we accomplish so much more with each passing year and decade that it’s basically like giving neurologists and computer scientists enough leeway and then some in his Singularity schedule. But how much more time? What’s the formula being used to measure how much more we’ll accomplish in a given time span compared to the previous one? Ray says those who doubt his predictions don’t understand his exponential curve, and that may be true. After all, it’s his creation and he picked all the arbitrary milestones and did his own calculations. And on top of his attempts to play the tech world’s Nostradamus, he also makes major mistakes about biology like this one…

The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.

Let’s see, where do we start with this one? Remember that in my previous post on the subject, I noted that the redundancy is there due to natural selection and that simply filtering out redundancies isn’t going to be of any help in retrieving only the information you need to recreate the instructions for a brain’s growth and bottom-up development. Also, how does Ray get the 800 million byte figure? If you store each nucleotide in your DNA as a character, you’ll have to allocate two bytes per nucleobase in memory. So with 6 billion nucleobases, you’re looking at roughly 12 billion bytes or 11.7 GB of data that you’d need to save to a persistent object. Which will still be hundreds of megabytes, even after some serious compression. Why do you think experts in genomics are calling for supercomputers to analyze genetic data? It’s not because it’s so easy to parse the immense amount of information and those “redundancies,” like repeated genes and STRs are actually rather important to growth and development in ways we still don’t know because we lack both the biological knowledge and a really good algorithm for parsing nucleotide sequences in an efficient and practical manner.

With that in mind, let’s move on to Ray’s bizarre claim that the genome limits the amount of information in the brain prior to it actually growing and developing. He keeps using the word information, but I wonder what he’s actually talking about when he does. In computer science, information is anything to be stored or computed in some way, shape or form. That information comes from a database, or user input, or one of the processes of the program with which we’re working. But in biology, the genome is telling the brain key stages of how it may form based on environmental cues and genetic triggers. And those triggers and cues begin as soon as cells start to divide into a new embryo. Where’s the limit of the information? What do you gain by knowing a string of nucleobases and the amino acids they encode when it isn’t actually a strict blueprint in the same sense we’d expect from a program? And what information could be in the brain when that brain hasn’t even started to form and create connections? That’s what makes our brains what they are and that should be the focus, instead of how we’re going to take a shortcut in our efforts to reverse-engineer them by ignoring their redundancies…

For example, the cerebellum contains a module of four types of neurons. That module is repeated about ten billion times. The cortex, a region that only mammals have and that is responsible for our ability to think symbolically and in hierarchies of ideas, also has massive redundancy. It has a basic pattern-recognition module that is considerably more complex than the repeated module in the cerebellum, but that cortex module is repeated about a billion times. There is also information in the interconnections, but there is massive redundancy in the connection pattern as well.

You know, for someone who says he studied this topic for four decades and is supposed to be up on virtually everything new in neurology and computer science, it’s pretty amazing that Ray is suggesting that all of those redundant connections could be ignored to get the structure of the brain and derive how it works on a neuron by neuron level. See, those redundancies are associated with higher cognition, and every living thing has a certain degree of redundancy as dictated by evolutionary processes. So what Ray is suggesting here is a terrific plan not to study what actually allows us to develop self-awareness and intellect, which we could really only get by studying the entire growth and development of the brain from day one. There are no shortcuts here and if Ray actually took the time to follow what neurologists and biologists say about these redundancies and how important their linking seems to be for high-level and complex brain functions, he would know that. Along the way, he also would’ve realized the true scope of the challenge. But then again, he really wants to become immortal so facing our limitations would also mean facing his fears. And he’s just not ready to do that.

addendum 08.24.2010: Okay, so it looks like I missed that Ray was thinking of a two bit data type for the base pairs, which really would yield an appreciably smaller file. That said, his reasoning behind the million lines of code it would take to simulate a human brain is still wrong (please see comments for elaboration as to why), and considering that we would only capture a sequence of amino acids, we would still need far more data. In fact, as biologists responding to Kurzweil have pointed out, you can’t derive a brain from the genome, and we can’t even derive complete micro structures from proteins yet because of all the complex interactions we have to take into account, interactions that depend on the development and the environment of the organism rather than its genome. Some of Ray’s defenders say that he’s not actually proposing to derive the brain from protein sequences, but if that’s the case, why even bother with DNA at all? Those amino acids encode what proteins are to be made and how, so it’s how these proteins interact that’s of vital importance if you want to understand how a brain is built during development, not just what amino acids being encoded with no additional context.

[ illustration by Goro Fujita, spotted on io9 ]

Well, not really, if you go by a recent survey published in PNAS. It’s not that there’s a shortage of the G variety of the OXTR gene, but it’s that those with the G type that tend to be the most hesitant to talk about problems or seek help in Korea, while Americans with the same gene type tended to be more open and willing to consult others. The explanation for the finding is that since the Korean culture is more formal and reserved, opening up could be taken a sign of weakness or a lack of good social graces, hence those who want help suppress their natural urges to open up to others. When that restriction is removed, the G types will happily talk about a vexing problem with family and friends. So what exactly did the study find that was new or surprising? It would seem like a survey confirming the obvious, just with a little genetics inserted into it for good measure. But the study’s write-ups are boasting that it’s actually looking at how genetics and culture interact. Take the reaction of neuroscientist Joan Chao about the survey’s implications…

“This [study] is breaking new ground. It’s one of the first to show that cultural norms themselves are environmental factors that interact with genes. That brings together two branches of science that have a long history of separation. We’re making really important and concrete steps toward bridging [gaps between] culture and biological sciences. That’s going to ultimately pay off in our understanding of physical and mental health factors that we all care about.”

Um, far be it from me to heckle the Dr. Chao, but how exactly does this study determine that culture interacts with genomes? If it did, wouldn’t we expect to find the less social A variant of OXTR in Koreans? It anything, it just shows that people who tend to be most concerned about social bonding in a culture which limits it, try to adhere as closely as possible to the dictated norm. The culture itself has no visible effect on the genomes or gene expression, it simply shows how it affects those who are naturally more social, and how some ideas of how we should interact are at odds with our evolutionary and biological inclinations. Why Dr. Chao would say that we now have proof that culture is mutagenic, I don’t know. Sure, culture could influence long-term genetic trends by dictating the rules for reproduction, as it has done for thousands and thousands of years, but that’s something we already knew and study quite extensively. This survey adds practically nothing to what we know about a culture’s effects on those who live by its customs, and declaring otherwise seems to stretch credulity quite a bit more than I’d feel is warranted considering its results.

When you are dealing with someone who disagrees with you on some matter, what is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? Insulting them, yelling at them, calling them brain-damaged, or morons, or baby-rapers, may make you feel good. [ ... ] It may help you vent, it may help you relieve frustration, it may help you rally the troops, it may even ferment some people to take action, and to be honest, it may allow you to feel smug and superior, at least in that moment. But is your goal to win a cheap point, or is your goal to win the damn game?

If you want to see the speech for yourself, the video is posted on his blog, as well as links to reactions to the speech, as well as, in my opinion, overly emotional accounts of how Phil’s friends received it. And it really is interesting to try and take a look at why Phil cares about whether skeptics get a bad reputation by relying on a dogma of their own, in which everyone must either conform to their worldviews or they’re a legitimate target of ridicule and are but one step away from the likes of Ken Ham, Deepak Chopra, or the Templeton Foundation, just waiting for the right moment to force creationism into science class. Unlike many of us who are devoted to trying to spread critical thinking and fact check bad science journalism, but do this mainly in our spare time, a brief period between work, study and daily chores, Phil does this for a living. He’s trying to look at this from the long term position, dreading that today’s skeptics may be dismissed as nothing more than bullies, cynics and shrill internet shock jocks who tar all people with different ideas with the same brush if we let those who do it call the shots about the direction of skeptical movements.

And to be objectively fair, quite a few of us do play that shock jock role at least once in a while, myself included. I’m all for snark and sarcasm, but what Phil sites are outright examples of verbal abuse that should be meted out judiciously, rather than just mixed with hyperbole and shouted from the rooftops. However, I still say that it is occasionally appropriate to call someone an imbecile, especially when whining about tone is being used to escape valid criticism and no matter how many times skeptics and scientists try nicely and politely, the cranks and lunatics in question simply refuse to even consider the voice of reason, portraying themselves as victims the second you let them know that you can tear their pseudoscientific theories to shreds. And it’s those utterly contemptible champions of conspiracy and pseudoscience who don’t deserve our civility. Although we have to make sure that abuse isn’t all we met out, and there’s a valid argument to support the insult they deserved.

Apparently, last time George Dvorsky and I were on Skeptically Speaking, the science and skepticism radio show, we caused enough of a stir to merit a second segment, and were asked to return in the last minutes of the show to answer listeners’ questions about artificial intelligence, the Singularity, and the potential of some popular and oft mentioned technologies. And now that time is finally here. This Friday, George and I are back to talk about the future of AI and tackle the debate of what the Singularity is and whether we’ll ever actually get to it, or if it really is the tech world’s equivalent of the Rapture. If you live in Canada, you might catch us on the air at 6:00 PM MST, and if you can’t listen to us on the radio, just go to the Skeptically Speaking site, and click on the Listen Live link when the show is scheduled to start. Meanwhile, e-mail and post your questions for us and time permitting, we might just try to answer it from our points of view.

If you want to refresh your memory on some of the related concepts, check out my debate with the Singularity Institute’s Michael Vassar, and have a look at some of the posts on the Singularity, transhumanism, and AI and the struggle to define intelligence in an objective way. And if any of that catches your interest, you might want to take a peek at the theoretical limits of computing, and the progress being made in the quest for the quantum computers that may one day get us there. There will be amazing advances in technology over the next few decades, but what could they actually offer us, how, and when? Tune in Friday and hopefully, George, Desiree, and I will be able to give you some ideas to consider. Usually, I’d say I’d see you there, but it’s radio and I’ll be in front of a computer, in a quiet room, wearing a headset, so that wouldn’t really work out…

So in what exactly do Kurzweil and his supporters ground their claim that a million lines of code would render an entire human brain? Considering that a piece of decent image editing software takes several million lines of code to program, we’re talking about a portable, digital brain the instructions for which could easily fit on an average thumb drive a hundred times over. According to Kurzweil, our genome has the all instructions for how our bodies build a brain. Compress the information in our DNA down to 50 MB by removing redundancies as well as unnecessary clutter, assume that about half of that is the brain, do a little basic numerology relating a certain line of code to a certain amount of bit and bytes needed to execute it, and presto! You have a brain in a million lines of code or so. This is what computer scientists classify under the highly technical term “bupkis,” and discard as a product of an inflamed imagination. But why, you may ask, is this prediction not even wrong, and where exactly does it go astray? The answer? Just about everywhere.

First and foremost, let’s consider the idea that the design for our brain takes up half our DNA and is stored in certain genes we could just decipher and use to build a perfect digital replica. This conception of how genes work to assemble the body might be passable in the 1970s or so on the pop science circuit, but today, many of us are keenly aware that this is really not the case. Genes provide probabilities and potentialities, and they change due to mutations, epigenetics, and environmental effects. How the brain grows, develops, and ages over time is what determines how the brain will ultimately wire itself. Grabbing a genetic blueprint sounds like an easy solution proposed by someone unaware of the scope of the actual problem. In reality, just knowing a sequence of base pairs participating in the development of the nervous system is only a small part of a really big and complex story. You also need to know the developmental sequence, the role of environmental effects, and all the intricacies of how neurons come together, start firing, and shape a new mind. All knowing how the genes are laid out will do is allow you to list the amino acids and proteins they generate in order.

Secondly, when Kurzweil talks about removing redundancies in the human genome, does he realize that he’d be messing around with potentially important regulators that might play a role in development? Sure, we have quite a bit of leftover junk in our DNA from out evolutionary past. However, would you trust someone like Ray to decide what looks important and what doesn’t? And on top of that, some of these useless genes could get an encore, getting re-activated and serving a new and useful function, affecting the development of neurons and how they connect to each other. Biological systems are very fluid. You can’t simply treat something that we’re not currently using as a simple matter of garbage collection, like a variable you declared and initialized while never actually using it. So far, what we have from Kurzweil is a plan to read a genome, map out the parts that play a role in the development of the nervous system and the brain, discard anything he doesn’t see as being all that important or necessary, then somehow turning the end result into a virtual brain. Without knowing the approximate bottom-up development sequence which biologists are still trying to figure out.

Finally, I’m just curious, since when has Ray become an expert in artificial intelligence? I haven’t seen papers or presentations from him on the matter other than monotone incantations of his self-indulgent chart plotting the exponential advancement of life from amoeba to the Supreme AI of 2045 and the subsequent Rapture of High Tech. Come on Gizmodo, don’t go down the Daily Galaxy’s path and assign superfluous titles to those who lack the advertised expertise. Yes, Ray created voice and optical recognition systems, and I’m sure he is, and should be, very proud of them. But as I’m trying to work on real world AI issues like machine vision, I’ve found zero papers on the subject from anyone in the Singularity Institute. Same goes with those who work on natural language processing and evolutionary behaviors. In fact, the most significant Singularity endorsed paper I’ve read barely even mentioned machine intelligence by design. Could we do Ray a favor and have a little talk with him to explain why all his grandiose declarations and claims of expertise in an area of computer science where his involvement is merely rhetorical are turning him into a side show barker of futurism? And while we’re at it, maybe tell Gizmodo not to breathlessly repeat his asinine claims?

Funny how a short story that was supposed to make you think about horrible things laying in wait in the ocean depths can be boiled down to about two minutes and lose most of its impact when told by a character from a spin-off of Clueless, or maybe a teenage new convert to New Age esoterica. It could be just me, but I’d rather have the Lovecraftian Chick Tract or the satirical tale of a board member asking his school to devote more time in their instruction of eldritch madness when it comes to homages to Lovecraft’s stories any day of the week. And to Grim and Grimy, shame on you for giving classic pulp horror the Valley Girl treatment.

So what’s the whole reason behind the issue of whether a massive, rocky world collided with Jupiter when the solar system was young? Well, the gas giant might be the biggest thing in the solar system besides the Sun, but according to most measurements, it seems to have a relatively small core for its size while Saturn, which is the second biggest planet, has a much heavier core despite basically being a giant puff ball that could float on water due to its low density. So what does that tell us about these planets’ formation? Well, we’re not really sure. That’s why the Jovian anatomy is still being measured and re-measured in planetary science and why a team of scientists in China wanted to see if a big enough collision could shed some light on the issue…

Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have begun life as rocky worlds with the mass of at least a few Earths. Their gravity then pulled in gas from their birth nebula, giving them dense atmospheres. In this picture, all gas giants should have cores of roughly the same size. Yet gravity measurements suggest Jupiter’s core weighs just two to 10 Earth masses, while Saturn’s comes in at 15 to 30.

Simulations by Shu Lin Li of Peking University in China, and colleagues, may explain why. They calculated what would happen when a super-Earth of 10 times the mass of our planet slammed into a gas giant. The rocky body flattened like a pancake when it hit the gas giant’s atmosphere, then barreled into the giant’s core about half an hour later. The energy of the collision could have vaporized much of the core.

Notice the huge margins of error in measurements of the gas giants’ cores. How accurate could a simulation be when we don’t really have a good enough grasp on the predicted final outcome? Another issue here would be where a super-Earth would form without sending the entire inner solar system in disarray. It would have to form relatively close to the Sun because that’s where the metals and silicates it would need are, then migrate close enough to Jupiter in an eccentric orbit and were it at any point to come close to say, Earth, there’s a very high likelihood that it could send our infant world plummeting towards its parent star, or into an awkward orbit, or even hurl it out of the solar system altogether. Since a super-Earth would take quite a while to gain its mass and solidify, the odds of such an encounter are very much non-trivial. And while it’s all well and good to create a mathematical collision on a computer, we need to take into account the big picture, something that seems missing from both the simulation, and the New Scientist article speculating on it.

[ illustration by Mark Sosbe ]