Soft Wetware

Insofar, so good

2013-07-29T02:47:00.002-04:00

The word "insofar" needs a comparative form. If it has one, the word will have a purpose in life, insofar as it's useful when you can compare the extent to which two clauses hold -- which is insofarther than it's useful when you can only equate them. And if it has a superlative form as well, it'll be useful insofarthest of all.

Exaptationist vs adaptationist Singularity, and engineerability

2013-06-10T23:33:00.000-04:00

In terms of total biological/social/technological complexity, human society may still be closer to the first single-celled lifeforms that colonized the Earth 4 billion years ago than we are to a technological singularity. But in terms of the logarithm of complexity, we're nearly there -- we have most of the orders of magnitude of progress we'll need. And because positive feedback loops continue to provide exponential or faster growth, that's what matters.

The Singularitarian's burden

The other day, it occurred to me how impressive it was that so much progress had been made without anyone or anything having to concern themselves with what their own or any other species was evolving into, or how quickly.

If we'd come that far without a targeted effort, how much faster could we progress toward the Singularity if we organized for that explicit purpose? Or if we weren't in a hurry, could we reduce the risk of an unfriendly Singularity, i.e. get some "Terminator insurance"? The standard assumption among Singularitarians seems to be that switching to "engineered evolution" is desirable if not essential, now that we understand the nature and dynamics of the positive-feedback loops involved.

But the first attempt to engineer humanity's evolution in a post-Darwinian framework was eugenics, which was clearly premature given Victorian-era science, and has clearly done more harm than good. Attempts to engineer technology's evolution (MIRI, Lifeboat Foundation, etc.) haven't caused a Holocaust yet, but they've led to a scientist receiving two death threats. At best, they've been a distraction, and they haven't produced any innovations that could feed the feedback loops (such as any algorithms a programmer could actually implement, compile, run, and get useful output from). And if it's possible to engineer the Singularity, then why did Ray Kurzweil get out of a successful engineering career (while allegedly in great health) when he discovered the concept?

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Anxiety, workaholism and transhumanism

2013-01-04T01:00:00.001-05:00

Max More, CEO of Alcor and noted transhumanist writer, sent me an e-mail last month that left me concerned about a possible epidemic of anxiety and workaholism within the transhumanist community. He wrote:

If you are actively working to bringing about technological advance, then clearly you are not a "passive singularitarian".

For what my opinion is worth (and I've extensively studied practical psychology, especially cognitive therapy), I strongly agree that "should" thoughts are emotionally and psychologically dangerous. [...] I'm concerned that Singularity-thinking can be a strong source of "should" thinking.

I share Max's concerns. Many transhumanists have probably been harmed by "should" thinking, as I was; and those of us on the autism spectrum are likely to suffer from anxiety without knowing it (more on that in my next post). I hope that by making my own battle with anxiety public, I can open a much-needed dialogue.
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The opposite of creationism: an antimetabole

2012-12-06T01:29:00.000-05:00

Singularitarianism is the opposite of creationism.

Creationists say God created humans in the shockingly recent past. Singularitarians say humans will create God in the shockingly near future.

When creationists look at evolution, they see the engineering of the universe. When Singularitarians look at engineering, we see the evolution of the universe.

Creationists say you should thank God for giving you computers. Singularitarians say you'll thank computers for giving you God.

Left-of-center, but not left behind in transhumanism

2012-09-12T08:57:00.001-04:00

The face of the future?! (Image credit: DonkeyHotey)

I was scared for a few hours when KurzweilAI.net posted the trailer for a film adaptation of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged last week, along with what looked like an unedited press release and no critical reaction.

What did Ayn Rand have to do with transhumanism? If transhumanism wasn't exclusively libertarian, why promote an author better known for libertarianism than anything? Why risk alienating the Left unnecessarily?

I'd recently read, in Cory Doctorow's review of a book, that transhumanism had originated among libertarians, that it had faced plenty of criticism from liberals, and that the book's effort to reconcile it with democratic socialism was long overdue. Was this pessimistic picture accurate? Would being a democratic socialist alienate me from transhumanism and vice-versa?
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Mind uploading: the write answer

2012-08-22T11:05:00.000-04:00

A 1st generation Apple iPad showing iBooks, with the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A book, one might say, is a document consisting of text, printed in ink on sheets of paper. A human mind, one might likewise say, is an entity consisting of ideas, thought processes and emotions, configured into neurons, synapses and glial cells in a brain.

But if I ask whether or not the book you're reading is Alice in Wonderland, I don't care what kind of ink or paper it's printed on, or whether or not it's printed at all. As far as the reader is concerned, a book is text, not the configuration of matter used to store that text. Nobody questions whether or not an e-book can be Alice, just because Alice was originally a printed book.
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Dehumanize me!

2012-08-08T11:21:00.000-04:00

The usual chart explaining the Uncanny Valley concept. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to a comment thread on this Slashdot post, which I just found yesterday, I don't instinctively act "normal" enough that the average person can accept me as a normal, healthy human being. But I'm too normal to be accepted as anything else. I have Asperger Syndrome (professionally diagnosed), and Slashdot says that puts me in the Uncanny Valley.

(While this hypothesis hasn't been confirmed to my knowledge, it's the only plausible explanation I can find for why Aspies are blind to our own and each other's publicly-perceived weirdness. The Uncanny Valley seems to be a fairly new, but very active, field of research. I'm treating the Uncanny Valley effect as a working hypothesis, while I wait for it to pass the test of science.)

Getting out of it on the human side won't be an option, at least until a way is found to reliably (and therefore without conscious effort) suppress the noticeable effects of Asperger Syndrome. It has to be done without throwing out the baby with the bathwater (apparently AS may be contributing to my talent in computer science). I figure if that's possible at all, it will require AI and/or neuroscience to reach near-Singularity levels.

Plus, staying on the right side of the Valley may prove overly restrictive if I need an extra pair of arms, or if the new chip I want to put in my brain needs a heat sink. A recent nasty incident, involving a camera eye, suggests that being an early-adopter visible cyborg (as I plan to) probably won't help in general.

But there's another option as well: climb out the other side of the Uncanny Valley, and become a cyborg in some non-humanoid form. Instead of rejecting me as an overly abnormal human, people can accept me as something else, and my human side will become a pleasant surprise rather than a let-down. This will probably be technologically feasible by 2030, and I'm already far from alone in wanting a change of body plan. I'd considered the idea before, but only in abstract terms. I'd assumed that looking more or less human for as long as possible would help with social acceptance.

It's a surprisingly Troperiffic conclusion. MySpeciesDothProtestTooMuch that I'm a HumanoidAbomination, because neurotypical people are hard-wired to be ObliviouslyEvil AbsoluteXenophobes. Until yesterday, my own WeirdnessCensor kept me so WrongGenreSavvy that I thought I was in AFormYouAreComfortableWith, and my plans to keep it that way would have been subverted. WhatMeasureIsAHumanoid? But if I become a OneWingedAngel, people will realize how much of me has been HumanAllAlong, and that's what any ProHumanTranshuman would want.

Time to start researching designs for non-human cyborgs, and deciding what I want to be when humanity grows up. Unlike the typical spiritualistic Otherkin, I'm not substrate-chauvinistic enough to believe I have a "true" form. But because I'm not locked into one, I have a wide-open catalog to pick from. Affective psychology class is tough; let's go shopping!

The Singularity movie is near

2012-07-16T05:30:00.000-04:00

IMDB says The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil's film adaptation of his 2005 book, is opening in the US this Friday. I don't know where they got this date from (all the other sources I can find just say "Summer"), but let's spread the word anyway. After all, the more people are expecting it to open on Friday, the more incentive there'll be for it to actually open on Friday. (And if the movie's release can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, then maybe its subject matter can as well, but that's another story.)

TSIN is part documentary and part science fiction, and you probably don't have to agree with many of Kurzweil's predictions to appreciate both parts. In the documentary scenes, Kurzweil interviews dozens of experts, gathers opposing viewpoints about the history and future of technology like any good documentarian, and presents his own conclusions.
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Computer literacy: the importance of reading for young artificial neural networks

2012-07-08T00:15:00.000-04:00

Photo from New York Times

Recently, a Stanford researcher and a Google X team made headlines with their study on unsupervised learning. Starting with one of the biggest neural networks ever built (1 billion connections and 16,000 CPU cores), they fed in a still frame from each of 10 million YouTube videos and watched it learn to identify human faces and cats.

But why aren't experiments on a similar scale being done with text data? I can think of three reasons why they should be.

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Boson-ward and upward

2012-07-04T03:57:00.003-04:00

Talk about too much excitement before bed! CERN confirmed tonight (both links still updating live) that they've found a particle of the right mass to be the long-awaited Higgs boson.

BBC News explains, though, that to confirm that the newly-discovered particle is the Higgs, scientists will need to know more properties than its mass, and that this'll take a few more years.

Higgs or not, it'll be exciting to see what other results --- and, I'm betting, practical applications --- the discovery leads to in that time.

Mind uploading: from mad science to peer-reviewed literature

2012-06-26T19:17:00.000-04:00

It's finally happened.

This month, for the first time ever, a peer-reviewed scientific journal dedicated a "Special Issue" to the subject of mind uploading. A theoretical process whereby human beings could become software, mind uploading promises all kinds of benefits imaginable, from immortality to cheap space travel.
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Breaking the not-Facebook addiction

2012-05-05T12:46:00.000-04:00

Why did I give up on Facebook years ago, and why did I decide today to come back? It's a long story. It started when I was a freshman, and got nothing but disappointment from Facebook that year.

My roommate went to a party school called Durham College, which happened to share the same dorms as my university's satellite campus. The matchmaking was an epic fail. He was in his fourth year of a 3-year program, had never even seen the campus library, and insisted on throwing a party the night before my first class, which I decided would be the worst time to show up without getting a full night's sleep first.

It was one of his party guests who insisted I open a Facebook account. The only people who friended me were the type my roommate tended to associate with -- extroverts who didn't believe in studying or being smart, and who were clueless about science and technology. Thus, I came to believe these were the only sorts of people who used Facebook, and all it was used for was wasting time. (This was back in 2007, so those beliefs may still have been widespread and partly true.)

After I moved into a single room, I stopped using Facebook. I thought, "Don't hate the players, hate the game." The problem was that by then, "the game" was almost everyone I could possibly ever come into contact with. For all practical purposes, "the game" was humanity.

Just as I was learning that smart people were out there (finding out about Transhumanism and Singularitarianism were a start) and that they used Facebook too, the horror stories started pouring in. Likejacking, cyberstalking, the online background check. Meanwhile, the Room 641A revelations were making my dad's ex-girlfriend's conspiracy theories harder to dismiss. Even though I used an anti-virus program and a browser that wasn't Internet Explorer, I felt safer staying off Facebook.

When Google+ came out, I was an early adopter. Finally, a social networking site from a company that had experience handling security and privacy, and where enough of the software engineers were old enough to know what they were doing! Alas, it never took off the way I hoped it would.

When the above "Not Google Plus" video came out, I watched it and commented, "I prefer not Facebook." But I didn't just prefer it -- I let it define me. It was how I stayed secure online, how I avoided distractions when I needed to study. In a sea of Facebook addicts, I was addicted to not-Facebook. Addicted, in other words, to being alone.

And then I wondered why nobody ever read my blog. (That's why I haven't posted much this winter -- I decided if I wanted to write stuff nobody was ever going to read, I'd work on my thesis.)

But things are changing:

Facebook has made some long-overdue privacy fixes, and ended the all-or-nothing fallacy of its social graph with an "Acquaintances" category.
A popular video has argued that social media can save the planet (highly speculative, but so are all the alternatives) and politics as we know it can't.
An expert argues persuasively that a lack of large teams is holding back progress in AI. Software has always been a field for extreme introverts, and AI is one of those fields where money isn't bringing us together in large enough numbers.
In two years, I'll need an advisor for a Ph.D. dissertation. I can't do it at the one university that already knows me, because they don't have a doctoral-level program in computing. Thus, I need to network with profs elsewhere.
I also need a girlfriend. As an undergrad, I decided to avoid distractions by staying single. But my biochemistry has changed to the point where being single is a distraction. (Which strikes me as a case of the tail wagging the dog, but maybe that's why it's called "getting some tail".)

Today I decided to give Facebook another try. It'll be a slow process, but maybe -- just maybe -- it'll be worthwhile in the end.

Academic Spring: it's over nine thousand

2012-04-12T05:24:00.000-04:00

Since Monday, a recent article in the Guardian about the Academic Spring movement has helped push the movement's main petition, "The Cost of Knowledge", past the milestone of 9,000 signatures by researchers. Although I've been busy for the past two weeks, preparing two papers for a conference (both of which will become open-access if they pass peer review), I figure it's time to make my stand.

Many of my Google searches lead me to paywalled scholarly papers, and many of these papers -- being mainly in the hard sciences -- aren't in journals my small, mostly liberal-arts oriented, university doesn't subscribe to (and won't provide me, a lowly grad student, with a budget to buy). Paywalls are a time-consuming nuisance, even when my university turns out to have the subscription or (more common) one of the authors -- or sometimes a random prof who obtained it for an undergrad class -- has posted a reprint online.

Even if I had the funding to buy all the paywalled papers I wanted, I would have had to spend dozens of hours filling out expense reports and typing in the university's credit card number. Eventually, the value of my time would probably add up to more money than the publishers were earning.

I'm against artificial impediments to the academic research process, because human prosperity for the rest of the 21st century will depend on the Law of Accelerating Returns. The sooner researchers' productivity reaches the limit of human capacity, the sooner researchers will discover a way to increase that limit, and the sooner the cycle will repeat. Paywalls never help.

Even if a university doesn't accept government funding for publication fees, plenty of taxpayers have paid for it indirectly through their undergraduate tuition. Research scholars like myself pay even more for it indirectly, by working for salaries far smaller than what we could earn in industry. If we're to give up wealth, social status and market visibility for our quasi-monastic devotion to the cause of science, the least society can do for us is to help keep greedy publishing companies out of our way.

Robot cars get green light

2012-02-28T01:01:00.001-05:00

Driverless cars can be licensed in Nevada

Google's driverless cars will hit the road sooner than even I expected. I thought it would take years to get regulatory approval for them anywhere! (Apparently regulations are the main reason we still don't have flying cars.)

Nice to see a bureaucracy actually getting out of the way of progress, and not just using that as an excuse to cut corporate taxes so the rich get richer. Maybe there's hope for this world after all!

GPGPU in the brain: neuroscientist-approved transhumanism

2012-02-02T17:08:00.000-05:00

I haven't been able to find a single neuroscientist publicly agree with Ray Kurzweil that either neuroscience-based AI or brain-computer interfaces are likely to progress far enough this century to lead to a singularity.

Given all this cause for pessimism, and the weight of scientific consensus apparently behind it, I was pleased to read that a prominent neuroscientist -- especially one who's been an outspoken critic of both Ray Kurzweil and IBM's artificial-brain projects -- had recently predicted a transhuman revolution. I was even more pleased when I realized the source of that revolution was analogous to a computing technology I'm studying for my master's thesis: general-purpose computation on graphics-processing units (GPGPU).
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The Healthy Workaholic's Manifesto

2012-01-30T13:23:00.000-05:00

Whereas, global food and water shortages, the dwindling supply of non-renewable resources, and the possibility of a nuclear war all imminently threaten to cause the collapse of society, if not human extinction;

And whereas, the only cause for optimism that such threats are humanly surmountable is the phenomenon of technological acceleration, and the revolutions it is expected to trigger in nanorobotics, biotechnology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence;

And whereas, research shows that people who tend to be the most dedicated to their work, to the detriment of our immediate health, also tend to be the most logical, analytical, creative, disciplined, self-confident, optimistic, and future-oriented;

And whereas, such people, if we work in engineering or scientific research, are therefore an indispensable asset in humanity's race against time to solve social, environmental, and economic crises technologically before they destroy us;

And whereas, both scholarly and popular discourse nevertheless derisively call us "workaholics", depict us in fiction only as evil (or at best unsympathetic) Mad Scientists, and label our heroic self-sacrifice -- or, depending on life expectancy, our sensible long-term investment -- as a symptom of a mental illness;

Resolved, therefore, that workaholism is among human nature's few redeeming virtues, and that it is to be encouraged and celebrated in all people who:

Work as, or are students training to become, scientists, engineers or professional philanthropists to help develop emerging technologies.
Maximize our actual contribution to our field worldwide -- and not just our time spent at work, our reputation among colleagues or managers, or our value to only one particular company's shareholders or one particular government's taxpayers.
Are concerned about the scientific and technological achievements of humanity as a whole more than about our own individually, so that we are motivated to cooperate rather than to compete.
Commit to resisting the corruptive influence of our power.
Accept that our lifestyle reduces our capacity to fulfill social and family commitments, and limit such commitments accordingly.

Workaholism isn't obsolete after all

2012-01-22T07:31:00.000-05:00

A week ago I confessed to being a workaholic, and wrote about how working too hard tends to lead to second-rate output. I quoted FM-2030 as saying that workaholics -- even those of us who love our jobs -- were too uncreative and all-around boring to be ready for the singularity and its precursor period (which he called the Telespheral Age).

On Saturday, however, Sean Henderson from the Abolitionist Society wrote, in reply to an e-mail inquiry of mine, "Present day work implies involuntary suffering - we'll need workaholics to develop the means to transform human design so that activity is blissful. Maybe the motto should be 'towards the abolition of suffering through suffering'."
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Virtual devices and GPGPU's untapped potential: my thesis project

2012-01-20T15:57:00.001-05:00

In 2001, Nvidia released the GeForce 3, the first video card with programmable shaders. They intended it to let game programmers invent new visual effects. But experts in high-performance computing started to wonder: How much processing power is on those video cards and now programmable? And why can't we use it to crunch numbers for lab studies and simulations? Research into General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) began. By the time Oak Ridges National Laboratory ordered 18,000 GPUs from Nvidia last October, one thing was clear: Video cards aren't just for games anymore.

But if Oak Ridges can use video cards to run applications faster, why does yours go unused when you're not playing games? Because of several software problems, one of which I'll attempt to solve in my master's thesis.
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My name is Chris, and I'm a workaholic

2012-01-15T07:38:00.002-05:00

In the small-town elementary school I went to, the teachers read us Aesop's "Fable of the Ants and the Grasshopper". They asked us what the moral of the story was, and prodded us into giving the usual answers. First, save for a rainy day. Second, hard work is a virtue that always pays off in the end.

John Maynard Keynes popularized the paradox of thrift in the 1930s, and by the postwar boom of the late 40s, everyone agreed he was right. Decades later, ants and uncles still teach the impressionable young grasshoppers of the Western world that thrift is a virtue. I believed this until Grade 9, when I was first exposed to Keynesian economics through a geography class. But I continued to believe the fable's other lesson, that hard work was a virtue, until this past Saturday.

#Occupy the #Singularity

2012-01-13T00:27:00.000-05:00

[A]s death to the mortal man so failure to the immortal[...]. (Imperial Thought of the Day, Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook 4th ed., p. 226)

Some Singularitarians have publicly jumped to the conclusion that younger Occupy Wall Street protesters have nothing to worry about in the long run. The argument runs like this:

Premise: Mind uploading will eliminate the need for food, water, shelter and medicine. The only necessities of posthuman existence will be data storage, processor hardware, and electricity.
Premise: Moore's Law, combined with a new abundant energy source (fusion? space-solar?), will make all three of these resources abundant and the cost of existence negligible.
Conclusion: Therefore, at the time of the Singularity, planet Earth will have transitioned to a post-scarcity economy without poverty.

I consider the first premise all but proven and the second highly probable, but I don't agree that the conclusion logically follows from them.
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Modern technology, obsolete economics

2012-01-11T05:01:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil and Kurzweil Technologies Inc.

Ray Kurzweil claims technology has been steadily narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Richer people still get new technologies first, but poor people are catching up. As proof, he offers us his chart "Mass Use of Inventions". Technological acceleration, Kurzweil tells us, means this trend will continue during the 21st century. When the Singularity finally arrives in 2045, it will finish -- not start -- the world's transition to a post-scarcity economy with no financial inequality. I'd like to agree with him, but I can't, for two reasons.

First, the idea of corporate-made technology as a social leveler amounts to trickle-down economics, a dead theory whose obituary hit the papers earlier this month.
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High tech, low budget?

2012-01-09T21:42:00.001-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

I used to think I'd always be able to live comfortably and cheaply. I didn't drive, I liked living in a small apartment, and I didn't care about owning such status symbols as a private art or wine collection. All I wanted that'd be a splurge for a student was a computer with the latest and greatest of hardware, which wasn't anywhere near as expensive.

There were also lots of things that weren't on the market yet, but that I'd want when they came out and became practical. A mobile, wearable augmented-reality device. A brain-computer interface and other cyborg enhancements. Utility fog to make shape-shifting clothes and furniture. A self-driving car, preferably a plug-in hybrid. But technological acceleration meant everything I wanted beyond a poverty-line lifestyle would get cheaper and cheaper. I didn't have to worry about pursuing a six-figure salary. Even working-class people would be able to afford the upcoming radical technologies we wanted, so Singularitarian Transhumanists could drop out of the rat race now and the human race later. Right?
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The future is expensive: introduction

2011-12-26T01:48:00.000-05:00

In late November, a stark revelation hit me: I hadn't made any financial plans past graduation, and I didn't know whether or not pursuing a six-figure salary was worthwhile. Worse, I couldn't make any financial plans with the knowledge at my disposal, because most of the major purchases I'd be making in my lifetime would probably be things that hadn't been invented yet! How does one budget for purely theoretical equipment?

I didn't have much time to research this question with exams and term projects on the horizon. What little preliminary research I could fit into my schedule led to three tentative conclusions:

The high-tech lifestyle was cheap, getting cheaper, and would continue to get cheaper.
Technology was narrowing the gap between rich and poor.
A post-scarcity economy, which the Singularity is likely to produce, will eliminate economic inequality. There will be no digital divide among digital people.

If even one of these assessments was correct, it would have been great news. As long as I was earning enough to live on from paycheck to paycheck, I'd be able to pursue a job I loved, or failing that, one with a decent 40-hour workweek. I wouldn't have to go to the most prestigious graduate school, and could pick one with a research project I liked. And if I did ever get a high salary, I could spend and be merry, because my retirement was safe. I'd do my part to stimulate the economy and keep Moore's Law alive. I might even be able to donate to research foundations and offset my personal carbon footprint.

Unfortunately, now that I've had time to research these three assertions in detail, I'm satisfied that they're probably all wrong. My next three posts will explain why.

Kurzweil: no prophet, but a name worth dropping

2011-12-22T08:31:00.000-05:00

For most of my undergraduate career, I wouldn't have been able to write a blog like this one. Without being thoroughly familiar with such keywords as "technological acceleration", "transhumanism" and "singularitarian", it was hard to articulate my visions and sense of purpose in life, and hard for Google to find me any of the relevant writing on the subject by futurists.

What finally got me going in the right direction was when one of my profs name-dropped Ray Kurzweil this summer, and I started reading his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
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3 reasons I stopped student blogging

2011-12-19T02:56:00.000-05:00

I ran a blog for a few months while I was an undergrad student, but two years ago I noticed that my only regular reader was my mom. (At least there was only one person to tell that I wouldn't be blogging anymore!) What held me back as a blogger? I blame three problems.

My main purpose in blogging was to earn money. Not to get rich, not even to make a living, just to help put myself through university. I didn't have time for a real job during the school year, and I'd been too pessimistic about being able to find one over the summer. Some say the love of money is the root of all evil, but I think the illusion of a need for money is far worse. Once the no-free-lunch reality of building monetizable traffic had set in, I turned to sponsored posting and grey-hat SEO. I ended up with a spammy blog that nobody would have wanted to subscribe to, and I still didn't make much money.