The Future Of Molecular Manufacturing

Chris Phoenix and Tihamer Toth-Fejel of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology think humanity will have molecular manufacturing only 10 years from now.

Molecular manufacturing is the capability to build products from the molecular level up. Being able to do this would be very beneficial to humankind. CRNano plans to achieve this by building a nanofactory. A nanofactory would be able to replicate itself quite cheaply, leading to many more nanofactories. All of those nanofactories can then replicate other, useful products. Cheaply, and rapidly. Since the products, built by a nanofactory, are 'perfect' at the molecular level, we can expect these products to be on the order of a thousand times more efficient than the products we have today.

One possible application would be CPU's that are orders of magnitude faster than today's CPU's. They would only require 1 or 2 watts to run (as opposed to many hundreds of watts that today's computersystems use), it would be easy to cool, and it would be really, really small.

It's obvious that such nanotechnology would be a boon to The Future Of Computers.

Many other benefits exist. As do dangers.

Taking a look at the article in which Chris Phoenix and Tihamer Toth-Fejel are interviewed, we can see that nanotechnologists are already viewing nanoparticles as LEGO-blocks. It's a sign of the times, really.

"That's the basic building block,” Toth-Fejel said. “We'll take one cube and put some fancy organic molecules on each corner and attach another cube to that. You do it again so you have two layers of silica, and this second-generation cube has certain active sites. Under the right conditions, and if you position them correctly, you can use them as building blocks. It's like LEGOs at the nanoscale.

.....

But that approach isn't as efficient as using, in effect, a silkscreen model. So Phoenix and Toth-Fejel have designed a simple pore that grabs a cube in a particular orientation. The receiving AFM tip gets a signal, moves and places the cube exactly where the product has been moved to receive it. "You can control the process to a greater extent. No blocks land accidentally," said Toth-Fejel."

And:

If Phase II funding is received, he envisions the more primitive model will be validated within a year or two. "If we can get that working, we're halfway to the smart silkscreen, and if we get there, we can build an atomically precise water filter. For space missions, that's quite important."

The same technique would also make possible an artificial kidney, he said. Perhaps after some tweaking, fuel and solar cells and more powerful computers and displays, too.

The silkscreen that is mentioned is an important part of a nanofactory. The whole concept is explained in this pdf. You need Adobe Acrobat Reader (freely available) to read that.

There is also a movieclip (rightclick to save, quicktime required) available of the nanofactory as it is envisioned by CRNano. It's more than just a movieclip. A computer simulation (complete with physics and stuff) has also been run of this machine. It indicates that the nanofactory would indeed work like shown in the movie if it existed in the real physical world.

Even though...

• simulations show molecular manufacturing is possible
• calculations show molecular manufacturing is possible
• the very existence of our own human bodies show that nanotechnology is possible (that's right: we could not exist if it weren't for Mother Nature's handy protein-machines, which indeed exist at the molecular level)

... there are still a few naysayers. There aren't many left:

Detractors say it's impossible. Phoenix says he's seen plenty of -- and done his own --calculations that prove it's not.

Toth-Fejel agrees. "I'm hopeful that within five years we'll have some pretty impressive tools, assuming funding. I used to think it would be 15 years, but that's no longer the case now."

And their numbers diminish every year.

It really looks like molecular manufacturing will be here shortly. Prepare for a wild ride.

Here's another interview with Tihamer Toth-Fejel, where he talks some more about molecular manufacturing.

The Future Of Working At Home

Working at home, or telecommuting, has been growing 15% every year since 1990. When something grows a certain percentage each year, it is growing exponentially.

And anybody who has read the Singularity FAQ for Dummies, knows what the implications of exponential acceleration are.

Does this mean that working at home, or W@H as some people like to call it, is the new standard of the future?

Most likely, yeah.

Working at home already is pretty popular right now. It has started a boom in 2004, and it is accelerating in 2005. There is definately a trend going on here. In this post, I'll analyze why telecommuting should and will become the standard of the future.


Why Telecommuting Is The Standard Of Tomorrow

We know that:

• Telecommuting is driven by our society's connectivity, which is basically the enabling technology behind working at home.
• People have the desire to make use of telecommuting, because of the many advantages (scroll down for a list) of working at home over working at the office.
• Our connectivity is increasing exponentially in bandwidth, and thus in quality and possibilities.
  

At some point in time, we will get to the level of connectivity where we will be able to routinely meet each other in a virtual environment that is audio-visually very compelling. Think about live, high quality videostreams and 3D-sound positioning technologies here. In an era where mobile computing is the new standard, we will be viewing these videostreams not with a clunky monitor, but with retina goggles that project images directly onto our retina's. Later on, we'll probably be using contact lenses to achieve this. You won't necessarily see the real person over the videostream, though. It may as well be a virtual avatar... a better looking version of the person you're communicating with.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not need many speakers (such as 7.1 setups) to achieve realistic 3D-sound. 3D-sound positioning can be done with a mere two speakers, or earplugs. After all... we humans have only two ears, and yet we can hear audio come from anywhere around us.

Virtual environments like these, that are audiovisually very immersive, will not allow for touch, taste, or smell. But people that work with computers for a living, are usually not that close to each other, anyway.

Therefore, we can safely conclude that working at home will be the standard of tomorrow... for officeworkers, at least.


Advantages Of Working At Home For The Employee

• You've got your own computersystem, which is often way faster than the average office system, which was bought on a budget.
• You've got your own monitor, which is often bigger than the average office monitor, which was bought on a budget.
• You've got your own tea, coffee, and other beverages.
• You've got the possibility to bake an egg, or toast some bread, and eat it warm.
• You've got your own radiostation. No more battles over the one station that everybody has to listen to.
• You've got your own chair and desk. Since you handpicked these, they are more likely to be suited to your personal ergonomic needs than the setup at the office.
• You've got your own toilet. Who doesn't hate to walk into a toilet with somebody else's stink in it, right? I always dread walking into a public toilet myself. Will it be bearable, or won't it? If not, you'll have to come back 15 minutes later. Will it then be bearable? Or has somebody else come along ahead of you to stink it up again? When walking into a public restroom, the suspension is always breath-taking. You never know what you'll encounter.
  
• No distractions.
• Your own working schedule. Better balance between your life and your work. Instead of taking a day off to visit your dentist or your doctor, you can simply plan around it.
• You'll lose no more energy by travelling big distances.
• You'll lose no more time by travelling big distances.
• As a result of the last three items in the list: You've got more time to spend on your own hobbies, which in turn leads to greater happiness, which in turn leads to a reduced chance of stress related psychological complaints, which in turn leads to a more efficiency, etc.
• The possibility of playing a videogame, grab the guitar and play for 15 minutes, or lift some weights when you're on a break. None of those things are available in the office, yet they are so mind-emptying. Very useful when you've got an information overloaded brain.
• The possibility to do your exercise in the morning. Everybody has the right to make investments in their own health, right? Why should anybody have to put up with declining health as a result of a 40-hour workweek?

Addendum for the exercise-argument:

Instead of going to the gym at the end of your day, when you're already exhausted and you've already had your diner, you can do your workout in the morning. Working out in the morning is a good idea because:

You won't have to spend the first 30 minutes kickstarting your fatburning mechanisms, and then exercise another 30 minutes to actually burn fat. When you work out on an empty stomach, you start burning fat instantly, and 30 minutes will be enough. This saves time.

If you're smart, you're morning workout is basically jogging outside. Having a workout outside contributes to yet more fatburning. Jogging outside is so much more of a strain on your body than running on a machine inside the gym is.

So basically, when you do morning jog-sessions, you:

• do your exercise when you've still have the energy for it.
• do your exercise efficiently, because of how human fatburning mechanisms work.
• have had your exercise for the day.
• have had your half hour of fresh air for the day.
• have had your bath for the day.
• have still got plenty of energy for rest of the working day.
• start your day with a ventilated brain full of fresh oxygen, which greatly enhances your efficiency.
  
• can look forward to a truly free evening for yourself.
• are investing in a healthier and happier future for yourself. Your employer will probably also be happy with your increased attention span and productivity, and your decreased absenteeism due to illness.
  

In other words: exercise is simply begging us to indulge in it in the early morning.

Does our current 9-to-5 system allow for this?

Nope.

Should it?

Hell yeah!!!!


Advantages Of Working At Home For The Employer

From www.prairiepublic.org:

• Reduced absenteeism costs.
• Reduced real estate costs.
• Reduced office space costs.
  

Advantages Of Working At Home For Society

• Less congestion.
• Less petroleum use. This is important in the light of rising gas prices and the current peak oil doomsday scenario hype.
• Less pollution.
  

Advantages Of Working At Home For Both Employer And Employee

• Increased employability. From the wikipedia site:
  

  Telecommuting options increase the employability of marginalised groups, such as mothers with small children, the handicapped and people living in remote areas. The set up also offers possibilities for increased service and internationalisation (telecommuters in different time zones can ensure that a company is virtually open for business around the clock).

  
  Imagine that an employee could work for any company in the world, regardless of its physical location. The total collection of companies that an officeworker can choose from would be orders of magnitude bigger than it is now. After all, there's only a handful of companies within your acceptable-travelling-radius. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have such a freedom in picking your future employer? Shouldn't this already be the norm in our semi-advanced society?
  
  This argument also works the other way. Imagine that you own a company, and you are in dire need of some serious talent, but you can't find any in the small acceptable-travelling-radius around your physical location. In a society where telecommuting is the standard, you've got access to a whole world of talented people. You're bound to find your talent at least a lot faster.
  
• Research shows that telecommuters are 25% more productive.
• Reduced employee-fuel costs.
  

Reasons Why Working At Home Isn't Happening Way More Often Than It Should

Things need time to grow. You can't realistically expect that every company will let all their employers work at home, just because I've got a blogpost that explains why that's how it should be.

When an employer tells you the company is not ready for telecommuting... what he's actually trying to say, is that he is not ready for telecommuting.

Change is gradual. And I don't mean just mental changes. It will take a change in infrastructure before working at home becomes the norm. Companies can't and won't massively sell off their office buildings, after reading this and realizing I'm right. Nor is it feasible to set up telecommuting-Internet-connections instantaneously. These things take time. But they will happen.


More Information

Some people are actually actively helping the future of working at home. Just take a look at www.telecommute.org.

There's a big report available about the Transportation Implications of Telecommuting. The report lists a number of benefits that are more or less converging with the list I came up by myself:

• Potential Employee Benefits
• Decreased Commuting Time, Work Expenses and Stress
• Increased Flexibility of Schedules
• Improved Work Environment
• Greater Job Responsibility and Autonomy
• Stronger Family Ties

The report also lists some concerns and doubts. Just thought I'd mention it, because I don't want to come off as biased and blind to all the bad stuff.


Conclusion

All in all, I think it's pretty safe to conclude that the advantages of working at home by far outweigh the disadvantages of it.

And that is why I think that working at home will be the standard of the future.

The Future Of Virtual Environments

Marshall Brain, founder of the very successful www.howstuffworks.com, is writing a book entitled The Day You Discard Your Body.

The book paints a picture of how humanity will, eventually, make the transition from our current, real life, meat-world into Virtual Environments (VE). The way Marshall describes it in his book is, ofcourse, one of the many possible ways this transition could be made.

Marshall has come up with a system (which is as of yet fictive) called Vertebrane. This system will stop the input from our real life senses and feed our brains a VE instead. Once we decide we like VE a lot better than real life, we'll move into it permanently, discarding our real life meat-bodies.

Ultimately, it is likely that we will indeed discard our bodies, and take up permanent residence in VE, because of the many advantages that VE has over real life. However, I personally think we'll get there in another way than Marshall describes. My view differs from Marshall's in that I think we will be using nanotechnology to accomplish this feat.

The idea is that nanotechnology, about 10-20 years from now, will have achieved the capability of being able to build nanobots: robots at the molecular level that can perform all sorts of useful tasks within our bodies. By that time, we will also have quite a bit of knowledge about the human brain. The reverse engineering of it is accelerating at an exponential rate, and extrapolations show it will be done somewhere around 2030. Once we understand it to such a degree where we could feed our brain artificial sensory input, it will become possible to create fully immersive VE's for ourselves.

This is how:

Nanobots can be built to take up residence in our brains, and replace our real life sensory inputs with VE input. The same nanotechnology that makes these nanobots possible, will also be able to provide orders of magnitude more computational power than we have available now. All this power can be used to render VE's right in our heads, that are at least as real as the real life, physical world we are used to. I'm truly talking about Matrix-like quality VE's here, that encompass all our senses and are therefore fully immersive.

Some advantages of VE over real life:

• Death and disease are non-existant, since virtual bodies cannot be harmed.
• Everything is for free, since it takes a computer system no more power to render a king's castle than a hobo's alleyway. Money will be irrelevant, and as such we won't be enslaved to it anymore. We'll be free to do whatever we like.
• Because of previously mentioned advantages, crime, and the suffering that goes accompanied with it, will become an irrelevancy. Why bother to steal something when you can get everything for free? Why bother to kill or harm anyone when you know it's not possible?
• You can adapt any form you like. You won't be held back anymore by limitations imposed on you by a bad genetic carddeck. Unfair advantages will not exist. Life will truly be a game, with fair rules and equal chances for everybody. Getting an extremely muscular body will just be a matter of downloading a body-model from the Internet, as opposed to the years and years of strenuous training it requires in the real world. Always wanted to know what it's like to be a dolphin, tiger or dragon? In VE, this is not a problem at all.
• You can be with anyone at anytime. Human contact won't require two persons to be in the same physical location anymore. This especially comes in handy if you'd like to have sexual relations (in which case it's really important to be in the same physical location!) with somebody you've met on the Internet. Today, when you meet an interesting gal/guy online, you better hope he/she lives close to you. Otherwise the relationship is off. What a drag!

Disadvantages of VE over real life are non-existant as far as I can see. Anything that is possible in real life, is possible in VE (provided the sensory input of the VE is of such a quality that it is not surpassed by the sensory input that reality feeds us, but that is just a matter of time). Not so the other way around. Reality is just another window. And a very uninteresting one at that. We will most likely come to view reality as a small subset of our future virtual lives.

For an interesting article that points out exactly how important VE is right now, and where it is taking us, read A World Of Warcraft World.

For anyone who has problems grasping how this scenario might pan out in a relatively short timeframe (I'd be surprised if we're not here before 2030), there is The Law Of Accelerating Returns. This article explains just nicely why it is that we'll be making ever more progress in ever less time.

If that article is too lengthy for you, have a try at my Singularity FAQ for Dummies. It explains exponential acceleration, and the implications of it, in less words.

We won't have to wait for VE's to become audiovisually immersive for a long time. Those type of VE's will be here very shortly. Read The Future Of Computers for details.

The Future Of Nano Materials

Researchers at the University of Texas have managed to come up with a production process for sheets made of nanotubes.

Nanotubes are important in nanotechnology. Mostly because they are extremely strong and very conductive. This is the kind of perfection that is achieveable when you get control of things at the molecular level. They can function as basic building blocks for all sorts of future nanotech-products, such as:

• Ultra-hard materials. Approximately 100 times stronger than steel, but 10 times lighter.
• Space Elevator Cables
• Molecular CPU Circuits. Orders of magnitude faster, low-powered, and easily cooled. See my previous post on The Future Of Computers for more information.

Even though there are many more examples to list, the implications of just these three are already vast enough to be in awe of for a few days in a row. I'll leave it up to the reader to ponder on this for a while.

I have been following news on nanotechnology for years. They have quite a history. And it sure is beautiful to see all this technology growing up. At first, it was all about finding a way to create a nanotube. When that was done, it was all about creating longer nanotubes. After that, it was all about having nanotubes self-assemble into complex structures.

After all these years, we are at the level of mass producing nanotube-sheets on demand. This is quite a milestone, which will eventually lead to products that are orders of magnitude more impressive than those of today. Oh, and it also ensures that progress in this field will keep accelerating exponentially.

The article mentions the possibility of using this technology to produce the displays of the future. And it could possibly happen very fast, as well:

Large, transparent sheets of carbon nanotubes can now be produced at lightning speed. The new technique should allow the nanotubes to be used in commercial devices from heated car windows to flexible television screens.

"Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialization seems possible," says Ray Baughman, a chemist from the University of Texas at Dallas, whose team unveils the ribbon in this week's Science.

Display technology produced with nanotubes would be very impressive:

The hope is that TV screens and those monster monitors on millions of desktop computers worldwide, which are TV-like CRTs, can be squashed into thin, widely affordable nanotube display panes. Compared with CRTs, and perhaps even with the liquid-crystal displays that are standard in today's laptops, nanotube displays could produce crisper images while using less power and could ultimately be cheaper to make.

I would like to add that it is also possible to create rollable displays, that you can take with you everywhere you go. Those rollable displays would sure help out getting the portable computing boom off the ground.

More on mobile displays is upcoming in another post on The Future Of Computers. You don't want to miss that one!

The Future Of Mind Enhancing Drugs

The site www.popsci.com has a nice article, entitled 'Will Drugs Make Us Smarter And Happier?'. Microsoft-employed transhumanist Ramez Naam, who has recently written More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, gives us his vision on the impact of drugs in the not too distant future.

The intro of the article sets the tone just nicely:

June 6, 2025, 7:30 a.m. The alarm is going off, and I feel great. Thanks to Reposinex, I've had a full four hours of deep, restorative sleep. My head hit the pillow, and boom! I was right into slow-wave delta sleep. In the car, driving to work, I sip an Achieve latte. I love these things-they sensitize my dopamine receptors, shift my MAO levels, and send my noradrenaline levels soaring. I have no jitters, and my concentration is tack-sharp. Driving used to freak me out, actually. I was involved in a bad accident a few years back. Good thing the doctor prescribed that trauma blunter. I still remember the accident; it just doesn't bug me anymore. I'm no longer one of those Human 1.0s-I'm a human with complete control of his brain chemistry.

This article paints a picture of what life may look like in a future where humankind has managed to get control of their brain chemistry. While the writer of the article seems to assume this type of technology won't be here until 2025, I personally think 2015 would have been a more realistic date. Extrapolations show that the golden age of biotechnology will be from 2010-2020, with 2015 right in the middle. It's entirely realistic to expect mind enhancing drugs in this timeframe... in my humble opinion at least.

The article goes on to describe how drugs, that were initially intended to help people with diseases, are used by healthy people to make them function better in daily life:

A pharmaceutical company develops a medication to treat a recognized physical or mental illness; people gradually realize that the drug can help healthy users too; doctors prescribe the substance to patients "off label," meaning for purposes other than the ones recognized by the Food and Drug Administration; and other people obtain it illegally. Thus, college students end up popping Ritalin to help them ace exams. Concert pianists take propranolol, a hypertension and angina medication, to ease preperformance jitters. And coffee addicts switch to Provigil, a sleep-disorder medication, for powerful, enduring, jitter-free stimulation.

In the future, we are likely to see much more of this. After the completion of the Human Genome Map (HGM) in early 2003, the number of genetic based drugs being researched has increased by an order of magnitude, or maybe even two (I cannot recall the exact numbers, but they were pretty impressive). The HGM is just one example of a milestone that allows for exponential acceleration of biotechnology. But it is an achievement not to be taken lightly, as it heralds the era of cheap drugs.

According to Naam, the implications of drug enhanced minds are vast:

These drugs wouldn't simply be nice to have, [Ramez Naam] and other enhancement advocates believe they would enable a societal transformation every bit as significant as the one wrought by computers.

The article goes on some more about the subject of mind enhancing drugs, and ends with some uninteresting opinions of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama. Both of them conservative naysayers, who are members of Bush's Bioethics Council. These two gentlemen would have us believe that enhancing ourselves would make us lose our humanity, and that drugs are unnatural. I'm pretty sure they have more unconvincing arguments against our transhuman/posthuman future, but I personally do not care for them.

Naam delivers the deathblow to the conservative arguments of Kass and Fukuyama, by making one simple, obvious, and essential observation:

"The urge to better ourselves has been a force in history as far back as we can see. Embracing the quest to improve ourselves doesn't call our humanity into question... it reaffirms it."

This article is just one of many articles in www.popsci.com's The Future Of The Body-section. Have a look. It's fascinating stuff. Definately worth your time. And many articles are very good eye-openers.

The Future Of Computers (2)

Not so long ago, I wrote a post about how computers are going to disappear from our view. After having read up on the subject some more, I have gained new insights. Therefore, I now write a follow-up.


M-RAM

A very promising technology that could play a very important role in the miniaturisation of computer systems: Magnetic RAM.

From the site:

Magnetic RAM, a new memory technology that promises to provide non-volatile, low-power, high speed and low-cost memory. Often described as the 'holy-grail' of memory, MRAM has the potential to replace FLASH, RAM and even Hard-discs.

Just think about how much space it would save if hard-discs and dvd-drives would be replaced by non-volatile M-RAM, which will be the size of the DDR-RAM working memory that's in PC's today. And it's low-power and high-speed (2Ghz record at time of writing) too!

M-RAM could also allow for instant-on PC's, which basically implies nobody will ever be waiting for a booting PC ever again.

I for one can't wait until we get rid of those nasty rotating media, that actually need to physically rotate in order to be useful. Very annoying. M-RAM truly is the holy grail of digital memory, combining all of the advantages (non-volatile, low-power, high-speed, small-sized) of existing memory-technology, but none of the disadvantages (volatile, high-power, low-speed, large-sized).

Here are some pictures of M-RAM, along with a brief explanation of how it works.


Portable Computing Boom Through Integration

The so-called 'Portable Computing Boom' is a' comin', and the industry expects it in the coming years. Battery makers are gearing up for it already, as they expect portable computer sales to overtake traditional computer sales as early as 2009.

The Mac mini is a good sign of the times. While its performance is not on par with modern desktop computers, it's getting awfully close. If anybody had built a mini computer like this five to ten years ago (assuming it was even possible), its performance would have been disastrous compared with desktop computers. Portable computer-performance is definately catching up.

Another sign of the times are Mini-ITX computers. An important keyword here is integration. As more and more functionality gets stuffed into one motherboard (or chip, or chipset, for that matter), the machine will take up less and less space.

From the site:

The Mini-ITX mainboard successfully integrates various combinations of readily-available chipset and processor components from VIA that come with rich feature sets that include ultra low power native x86 processors, onboard LAN and various integrated AGP graphics and audio options. Further enhancing its versatility, the Mini-ITX mainboard can include CompactFlash and CardBus slots, TV-Out connector, SPDIF 5.1 audio, USB 2.0, 1394 (Firewire), integrated MPEG2/MPEG4 decoding, support for up to DDR400, Serial ATA and much more.

That's downright impressive. This integration trend has indeed been quite a stubborn trend for years now. Motherboards now have integrated 8-channel sound, ethernet, and firewalls. And what about cell phones? When you buy one, you might wonder if you have actually bought a cell phone. Perhaps you accidentily bought an mp3-player? Or is it a digital camera? Or a PDA, even? Oh wait... cell phones are all of that combined into one.

See my point?

Also, read this article about how consumer-tuned chips exemplify the integration trend:

As a given application increases in popularity, system shipments rise, competition emerges, and cost pressures consequently increase, Moore's Law inexorably comes into play. Chip vendors at the core of the system design pull functions that formerly resided in separate peripherals into their next-generation products. These core semiconductor suppliers also expand the overall capabilities of their products and therefore the ability for their customers to differentiate themselves from their competition.

The term "System on a Chip" or "SoC", has recently gained popularity. Take a look at what this Google search yields when searching for "system on a chip".

The SoC is certainly the holy grail of integration.


Portable Computing Boom Through Mobility

IBM researchers recently came up with something they have dubbed Soul:

Personal computers could soon fit entirely on a key ring. Researchers at IBM in New York, US, have developed a way to carry a powerful, personalised virtual computer from one PC to the next, without losing the user's work.

This is yet another approach towards a full blown portable computing boom.


Other Links

Visions of the Future, by Brendan Kitts and Stefan Koch
The Future Of Computers, by Robert Freitas


Conclusion

A serious assessment of current integration-, miniaturisation-, and mobility-trends show that the portable computing boom is indeed inevitable. We will be living in a truly portable society in the not too distant future.

A Stimulating Collection Of Blogposts

Dick Pelletier (aka 'futuretalk') maintains a blog over at www.betterhumans.com, that's basically about "Our Technological Future". And that just so happens to be the name of the blog you're reading right now. ;)

Dick's writings are, just like Ian Pearson's, completely devoid of any argument for why our future might pan out as he describes. But don't be too quick to dismiss Dick Pelletier as naive and over-optistic... whenever I ask him to provide sources for his claims, he's always able to provide them. The guy certainly has done his research.

The future scenario's about which he writes are quite consistent with the ones that other futurologists (Kurzweil, Pearson, people on Singularity fora, etc.) predict. Dick has written about topics such as:

• Nanotechnology's impact in the near future
  
• Healthcare in 2020
• Memory drugs
• The future of the Internet
• Artificial life
• Uploading
• Human-machine mergers
• Physical immortality
• Artificial wombs
• Chip implants to allow control of machines
• Robots
• Autonomous cars
• Telepresence
• Gene therapy
• The Singularity
  

And probably much more...

Even though Dick Pelletier has the tendency to fall into repetition from time to time, his blogposts still make for a stimulating, feel-good sort of read.

The Future Of Computers

Computers will disappear.

Well, that is to say... from our view, at least. In truth, computers will be everywhere, but they will be so small, you're going to have to look for them in order to spot one. Computation will be as ubiquitous as oxygen, or electricity. It will just be there, making stuff work. Possibly as early as 2010.

The enabling technology for this scenario is nanotechnology.

I have been following nanotechnology for years now. It has gone down an interesting path of increasing acceptance over the past few years. It is also speeding up exponentially. You can actually see this very clearly if you follow the news closely on sites such as the CRNano Blog.

A decade ago, many doubted the feasibility of 3D molecular computing.

Only five years ago, researchers were struggling to come up with a way to produce nanotubes, which are very basic elements of future nanocircuits.

These days, however, researchers are already making huge steps in finding ways to to build true nanocircuits.

For instance, take a look at Hewlett-Packard's crossbar latch. This crossbar latch is the nanoscale equivalent of the transistor, which is an elementary building block of silicon CPU's. This is an essential step in the right direction, if you want to make the transition from today's silicon CPU's to tomorrow's (much smaller and way easier to cool) nano CPU's.

Hewlett-Packard also has come up with a practical strategy for moving computing to the nanoscale, using its own crossbar architecture. Hewlett-Packard is planning on replacing silicon with nanotechnology. An interesting quote from the article:

According to HP, the crossbar latch architecture is six to ten years from widespread use.

Part of Hewlett-Packard's strategy to make the transition to the nanoscale, is a new way of designing nanoscale circuits. From the article:

"We have invented a completely new way of designing an electronic interconnect for nano-scale circuits using coding theory," said Stan Williams, HP Senior Fellow and director, Quantum Science Research at HP Labs. "By using a cross-bar architecture and adding 50 percent more wires as an 'insurance policy,' we believe it will be possible to fabricate nano-electronic circuits with nearly perfect yields even though the probability of broken components will be high."

Another interesting quote from the article:

Williams also said that HP had created working models at "about a third the size of today's chips."

Silicon chips aren't expected to reach that scale for at least seven years.

Hewlett-Packard is, ofcourse, not the only one making advances like these. For example, physicists at the University of Pennsylvania have recently successfully created a functional electronic circuit at the nanoscale. A truly impressive achievement. One that will probably go a long way.

When reading about advances like these, it becomes clear why futurologists like Ray Kurzweil seem to think that the portable, ubiquitous computing scenario will happen by 2010. His predictions are consistent with Hewlett-Packard's timeline. A quote from Ray Kurzweil:

Let's look at a few trends. A lot of the equipment that IT departments concern themselves with now-routers and servers-will all be gone. There won't be computers on desks. We'll eliminate most of that clutter, certainly by the end of this decade.

Technology will be very mobile; it'll be so small that it'll be virtually invisible. Everybody will be online. Images will be written right to our retinas. We'll have very high-speed bandwidth connections at all times. The computing substrate will be everywhere.

If you're interested in the implications of portable, ubiquitous computing, supposedly at the end of this decade, you'd do good to read Kurzweil's view of the year 2009.

The Future Health Of Our Brains

If science has anything to say about it, humans won't be suffering from any brain diseases (Alzheimer, Parkinson, schizophrenia, etc.) in the near future.

As I have already explained in my Singularity FAQ for Dummies, science has already clearly demonstrated that it is perfectly capable of understanding how our brains work. In fact, the reverse engineering of our own brains has been going on for quite a while. And in the near future, it's about to hit new heights.

For example, take a look at the article 'Computer Scientists To Copy Brain Of Mammal'. It's obvious that science will learn a great deal from simulating whole brains 'in silico'. This will lead to more effective cures, that are finetuned to how our brains work. Also be sure to take a look at the official site of the Blue Brain Project.

You need a lot of processing power, in order to run simulations like these. But if we extrapolate into the future a few years, we see that processing power will not be a limiting factor.

Simulating whole brains gives us ever more knowledge of them, which in turn leads to better cures. Using the knowledge we already have today, efforts are underway to have our brains repair themselves by activating the stemcells that are present there, but currently inactive. This is done with the use of nanotechnology, which delivers therapeutic genes exactly where we want them. You will be hearing a lot more of nanotechnology, and nanotech-aided cures in particular, in the coming years.

More on future nanotech-cures can be found in an article entitled 'Nanotech Moves Closer To Cure'. Not directly related to brain health, but not exactly excluding it either.


Science will one day, in the not too distant future, be capable of growing new organs for our bodies on demand, through therapeutic cloning. But the brain cannot simply be replaced like any other organ, when it gets ill (for obvious reasons, methinks). The brain is the only organ in our bodies that needs repairs 'in situ'.

Thanks to advances like the ones mentioned above, we can all look forward to much healthier bodies and brains for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our future children.


[update]

Scientists Create Working Brain Cells

Ian Pearson's concept of the Singularity

Not too long ago, Ian Pearson (well known futurologist) claimed that brain uploads would be possible around 2050 for rich people, and 25 years later, in 2075, for people with standard income.

Here's one of the articles that talk about it:

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/05/23/brain.download/

This claim caused many people to post all sorts of uninformed opinions. Because of a lack of understanding of the technology that humanity will soon posess, posters naturally assumed that Pearson's claim was ridiculous.

I, as well, find Pearson's claim ridiculous. But for another reason. And that is because Pearson's claim is ridiculously conservative. I emailed him about this, and I am now posting my conversation with him. Perhaps it can lead to interesting conversations in the comments-section of this blogpost. Even though Pearson is probably completely wrong in his predictions, it is still stimulating to read about someone else's view on the Singularity.


========== My Email To Pearson ==========

Dear Ian,

I consider myself to be a Singulatarian, and I'm always scouring the net for articles regarding anything transhumanism-related. I have also read many of your futuristic writings. Although they are completely devoid of any argument, I enjoy them anyway, because I am familiar (thanks to Kurzweil) with the 'exponential' line of reasoning behind the future you advocate.

However, I feel that you do not completely comprehend the sheer vastness of the Singularity, aka the creation of superhuman AI.

You state that we may create SAI before 2020, yet you go on to predict that uploading won't be here until 2050 for the rich, and it will be here 20 years later for the common folk.

I have read Yudkowsky's "Staring Into The Singularity", and it has given me an understanding of the vastness of the Singularity. Not that my puny human intellect could ever grasp anything that is out of reach by many orders of magnitude... but it DID give me a realistic sense of what the Singularity implies.

Staring Into The Singularity: http://www.sysopmind.com/singularity.html

To me, it seems more likely that uploading, and every other thing we could ever dream up, will be available a fraction of a nanosecond after the Singularity has hit. Completely for free, ofcourse. Running an entire planet smoothly is a triviality to a mind billions of times faster AND smarter than us.

I am assuming a friendly and humane SAI as I write this. Why would a friendly SAI let us suffer through 40 hour work weeks so we can barely pay our way through life? It does not make sense. It doesn't make sense to think there will still be an economy once the Singularity has hit. That whole concept will have vanished. Nor does it make sense to think the SAI that constitutes the Singularity will adapt itself to our slow physical world. It would be more logical to assume the SAI will create it's own society in VE. And since it is also logical to assume the SAI will be running on a substrate billions of times faster than our subjective experience of time, we can safely say that the Singularity will render our society IRRELEVANT immediately.

Since we are not super intelligent, we cannot think the thoughts that an SAI might think. Therefore, we cannot predict what happens beyond the big S. That is why it's called the Singularity in the first place. Our model of the future breaks down at the technological Singularity, just as our model of physics breaks down at the center of a black hole.

I am looking forward to your feedback on this.

Sincerely,

Jay


========== Pearson's Reply ==========

Hi Jay, I think about the singularity regularly. I don't make all my arguments explicit becaue I only have limited time to write, but of course I don't reach my conclusions out of thin air. There are other limits to the system than just intelligence. We may have vastly superhuman intelligence at our disposal, but there are still basic problems of physics that aren't circumvented by it. Even if we are able to design superior technology, it would still take time to produce it, even if it is done by nanoassemblers etc, since these too would have to be assembled first etc. Human regulation also slows things down tremendously, and I certainlyu would resist free-run of tech beyond human control. A managed tech development will be much slower than a theoreticakl singularity whihc means tht although we would have huge intellectual capability, things will still proceed at human rates, so the singularity will not be instantaneous, but spread out over decades. Sorry if that sounds dull, but if you try to push technology at computer speeds in some sort of James Bond villain scenario, you would simply be wiped off the planet by humans who have perfectly adequate weapon systems long before you get a chance to build the ones designed by any superhuman power. If you do it in a managed way, it will happen, but will take longer.

Ian


========== My Reply ==========

Hi Ian,

Basic problems of physics and human management to limit the intelligence explosion of an SAI?

An SAI will not allow itself to be limited by either.

As you have stated yourself, we are only a few years away from having CPU's faster than the human brain. What happens if computers are doing the research, and their speed keeps on doubling? I'm not even taking into account here that such a machine would not just improve on its own speed, but also the quality of its thought. At first it doubles in a year. Then it does a subjective year of work in half a year. Then in 3 months. Boom.... Singularity. So much for the physics argument. An SAI going at millions of years per second will render our 50.000 year old species irrelevant on the spot. So much for the human management argument.

Pushing technology at computer speeds is exactly what is the whole POINT of the Singularity. What you need is a friendly, humane SAI, that has a very well defined goal. An SAI will NOT do anything OTHER than try to achieve the goal it has in it's own mind (ref: one of many of Yudkowsky's writings). This goal, ofcourse, needs to be something along the lines of "recursively improve, be friendly to human beings, help them in any way possible". To a machine like that, building Utopia is real easy. We really do not need to wait decades and decades for........ for what exactly?

The Singularity is commonly defined as a single point in time (and rightly so), not many points spread out over a few decades.

As for 'taking time to build weapons designed by SAI'... that does not make sense. Will an SAI really deliver us the plans for a weapon so we can build it ourselves? Or will the SAI come up with an idea, that outshines our most brilliant minds by at least a billionfold, to build those weapons quick and efficient?

That previous question is actually pretty irrelevant. AI's are not going to bother with the physical world. They'll take up permanent residence in VE.

If you can find the time, dig a little deeper into Yudkowsky's writings. He really knows how to think about matters like these, and he has written extensively on the subject.

Jay


========== Pearson's Reply ==========

Nothing new here, I myself explored all the same arguments you pose back in 1990, so I've been writing about it for 15 years too. Positive technology feedback was one of my first major insights when I started doing this job. I even rely on it in the design of my own OB1 (optical brain 1) machine, whihc I'm designing to achive human level intelligence by 2015, potentially 1 billion x human intelligence by 2020, in a smart yoghurt. But thinking about these things properly, as you put it, it still can't violate the laws of physics so there will be no point singularity, ever. Most of us who talk about the singularity recognise this and realise it will actually just be a period of lightning fast development that takes place over at least a few years. Development will always take some time, even in an age of self-relicating nanoassemblers, direct energy conversion or whatevr wishful thinking you want to use. But the OB1 machine won't arrive overnight, and the military are already well aware of the project type (we've been discussing this with the military for many years), so it isn't going to suddenly arrive out of the blue and will almost certainly be made illegal before we start building it. If it does get built, it will almost certainly arrive first in a weapon system, if only for the reason that that is exactly what I would recommend, since we need to have poweful weapons to defend ourselves against anyone lese who tried to go dwon the same path. Human management takes effect long before it exists, since we all know that afterwards is too late. Mankind isn't that stupid, usually. The terminator scenario is certainly feasible, but only if we cock up the development. Allowing the construction of an AI that can free-run and eliminate mankind isn't a clever thing to do.

VEs are as you say the likely home of AI most of the time, and many people will also live in VEs. And some of us will be hybrid, and some of us will have numerous instances, and some of us will be Borg. All good fun.

Ian


========== My Reply ==========

Ian,

You say development takes time in the physical world. You also say AI's will mostly live in VE.

Since we know there are no limits in VE, this seems like a contradiction to me. The physical world won't matter anymore. Why would an AI bother with clumsy, slow, physical bodies if it can work magic in VE?

Also... who says SAI's can't figure out with a complete and correct model for physics as they actually are? What if physics as we know them today are not correct?

It certainly seems that way, since we're trying real hard to tie Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics together with string theory.

In the past, the plug has been pulled an physics models before. Who says it can't happen again?

Creating an AI that wants to take over the world is indeed a very bad idea. This is why it is so important that the AI needs to have a goal in mind. It NEEDS to WANT to be friendly and humane. As Yudkowsky adequatly puts it:"If it doesn't want to be friendly, you've already lost.".

A friendly, humane SAI will, by definition, want to help mankind raise its living standards. Therefore, building it is an exceptionally good idea. It's also quite necessary, since nanotech is coming fast, and humans aren't capable of managing with 100% safety.

When the FHSAI reaches a point where it's rediculously fast, and living billions of years a second, it could easily ask somebody the question:"Do you want to upload and live a really good life with me here in VE?".

If you'd say yes, then I think this would qualify as quite a rapture in time. A point Singularity, if you will.

Jay

========== End Of Conversation ==========


Discuss!

More of Ian Pearson's writings can be found at:

http://www.btinternet.com/~ian.pearson/

Singularity FAQ for Dummies

To start out with, I am now posting a Singularity FAQ for dummies that I have written myself. I've dubbed it version 0.5 for now. I'm counting on lots of additional questions from all of you, which I will include so I can upgrade the version number. I'm sure there are spelling and grammar errors in here, but hey... it's only version 0.5, right?

The reason I wrote this, is because when I'm reading posts on fora or in newsthreads that are related to artificial intelligence, I see lots of uninformed opinions. This is not always the posters' fault. Very often, an interviewee will tell an interviewer "By year xxxx, we will be able to upload our conscioussness to virtual reality.", without giving any explanation on how this might be achieved. Posters then proceed to naturally assume that this is nonsense, and that it will never happen.

Uninformed opinions like that are mostly fueled by ignorance. I felt this is not necessary, since a few simple insights can lead a person to adopt a complete different set of views on a certain subject.

From now on, ignorance on the topic of the Singularity will be a thing of the past, because there's a FAQ available now. ;)

Enjoy. :)


[update]
0.5 Initial Version
0.6 Questions added, answers expanded, spelling corrected.


========================================
Singularity FAQ for Dummies, version 0.6
by Jan-Willem Bats

Last update: July 21st, 2005
========================================


Q. What is the Singularity?

A. The Singularity is defined as the point in time where Superior Artificial Intelligence (SAI) is created. An SAI can, by definition, think thoughts that human intelligence can not. This then, is the point where our model of the future breaks down. We cannot possibly predict what an SAI would come up with at 'the other end' of the Singularity. We are not superintelligent ourselves.

The Singularity (with capital 'S') is a term that was borrowed from the singularity (small 's') at the centre of a black hole, where our (current) model of physics breaks down.

-

Q. Is the Singularity purely a science fictional concept?

A. No. Even though science fiction writers have played with the concept of a technological Singularity, this does not mean the Singularity will always remain in the realms of sci-fi.

The Singularity can be achieved by creating SAI. Many believe that it is possible in real life to do exactly that by creating an AI that can learn general stuff, just like humans can. In addition to learning capabilities, the AI must also be able to improve upon itself through understanding of its own configuration, and the ability to alter itself.

-

Q. How can an AI be created?

A. Creating AI will require two things:

1. Hardware: a substrate for intelligence to run on. The hardware must be sufficiently fast. It will most likely have to be some kind of dynamically configurable neural network, just like our own brains.

2. Software: the actual intelligence itself. The software must consist of algorithms that are truly, generally intelligent (iow: not just simulating intelligence in a very narrow field, such as chess). This is by far the hardest part of creating SAI, since it is such a hard problem to find out what exactly intelligence is.

-

Q. When will we have the hardware required to create an SAI?

A. Assuming that the hardware needs to be capable of at least as much operations per second (OPS) as a human brain: 2020.

If the human brain were to fire all its neurons for one second, it would fire approximately 10^14 times. It is obviously possible to run an intelligence on a machine of this speed: we *are* those machines. Therefore, it is safe to assume that 10^14 OPS is fast enough to run an AI on.

The number of OPS, that our hardware can perform, is accelerating exponentially. It has been doing this for decades, and it is expected to do so for decades more. Exponentially extrapolating hardware speed into the future, shows that we will have $1000 dollar CPU's capable of 10^14 OPS in 2020. Note that some supercomputers today already perform this number of OPS, or more. The PlayStation3 CPU runs at 10^12 OPS, which is 1% of the magical 10^14.

Most likely, just speed won't be enough. As mentioned earlier in this FAQ, the hardware will probably have to be a dynamically configurable neural network in three dimensions. This is a far cry from today's CPU's, that have only one layer of circuitry, and are therefore two-dimensional.

Nanotechnology, however, allows for building CPU's in three dimensions. At the molecular level, cooling hardware is a lot easier. Because of that, it will be possible to stack circuitry layers on top of each other. It will also be possible to build neural networks using this technology.

Sidenote: Extrapolations haven't always shown 2020 as the year where the numbers (brain OPS and CPU OPS) match. In the past, extrapolations showed it would be 2035. A few years later, people noticed CPU efficiency was actually going a tad bit faster than just 'plain' exponential growth, so they corrected the figure to read 2030. This happened a few more times, and current extrapolations show 2020 to be the year.

It is not uncommon for extrapolations to be conservative in retrospect. Consensus predictions have shifted forward (that is: closer to the present) before. In all likelihood, they will continue to do so in the future.

It will probably be before 2020.

-

Q. When will we have the software required to create an SAI?

A. Whenever we figure out how intelligence works by reverse engineering our own brains.

Most people think, or naturally assume, that our own intelligence is beyond us. This is actually a misconception, since we already know that it is not.

The reverse engineering of the human brain is a project that is already well underway. Several regions of the human brain are already thoroughly understood, and their functions have been replicated using algorithms written in standard program code. Algorithms, that have been heavily inspired by how our own brains process visual stimuli, are already used in some videocameras. Speech recognition technologies make use of algorithms that researchers came up with after figuring out how sound processing occurs in the human brain.

Jeff Hawkins, a well respected AI researcher, has stated that, when the workings of a certain brain region are understood, it is entirely possible to describe these workings with mathematical formulas.

Already, hardware is beginning to merge with our brains. There exist people that suffer from diseases, like Parkinson or epilepsy, that have chips in their brains to correct irregular brain functions.

Researchers have also created a CPU to function like a rat's hippocampus. They did this by providing input to a slice of actual rat-hippocampus tissue, and analysing the output. This input/output has been reproduced succesfully in a CPU. This silicon implant performs the same processes of the (damaged) part of the brain that it is replacing.

It is (and has been for quite a while) clear that the understanding of intelligence is not beyond us, contrary to popular belief. So when will be have enough understanding of our intelligence to reproduce this in order to build an AI?

Extrapolations show that it will be possible to see what is going on inside a human brain, in complete detail and in real-time, in 2015. Extrapolations also show that the reverse engineering of the human brain will be complete in 2030.

Naturally, we won't have to completely understand the human brain before we can use our knowledge to build AI. So we will probably build the software well before 2030.

-

Q. Where did you get this 10^14 number?

A. The human brain has 100 billion (100 * 10^09 = 10^11) neurons. Each neuron has on average 1.000 (10^3) connections. These neurons fire at most 200 (2 * 10^2) times per second.

The calculation then yields 10^11 * 10^3 * 10^2 * 2 = 2 * 10^16.

Careful readers have noticed that this calculation yields a number that is two orders of magnitudes greater than 10^14. This is because conservatively high numbers have been used in this calculation.

This implies that it is highly unlikely that the human brain has more than 10^16 OPS, and that it is highly likely that it has actually way *less* than that.

The 10^14 number is what most people consider to be more accurate. Even if this turns out to be the wrong order of magnitude in retrospect, it won't matter so much. It will only shift predictions by a few years.

-

Q. Why do you rely on extrapolations so much?

A. Many people would claim that it is impossible to tell the future. I would claim that these people are dead wrong.

There is one way to tell the future, but it only applies to technological progress. Here's how it works:

When building technology, you are actually building tools that you can use to build the next generation of more advanced tools. This generation of more advanced tools, can then be used to create a generation of tools that are yet more advanced.

This is called a positive feedback loop. Any process that has a positive feedback loop (such as building technology intelligently, like humanity is doing right now), is inherently an exponentially accelerating process. This is the reason why progress just keeps going ever faster, and why our society is changing ever faster.

This exponentially accelerating process has been in effect since the beginning of life on Earth. If you were to cram the complete evolutionary process in one hour, the upstanding homo sapiens (modern man) does not show up until the last millisecond. This is the power of exponential growth.

Why then, are exponential extrapolations so extremely valueable?

It is because these extrapolations have, in the past few decades, proven to be very accurate at predicting our technological future. These extrapolations have, for example, been used to predict when the Internet would become mainstream. For many people, it just seemed to pop out of nowhere in the middle of the nineties. This is not correct. The Internet has been around since the late sixties, and it has been consistently doubling its nodes ever since. If you had known about it (and some people did), you could have plotted this trend on a graph. It would show up as an exponential curve, that hit the sky-rocket part around the mid-nineties.

Extrapolations have also been used to accurately predict when a computer would beat a human being at chess. Computers were consistently improving 45 rating points per year, and Ray Kurzweil was smart enough to notice the trend. He predicted 1998 to be the year. It turned out to be 1997. Not bad.

Extrapolations have been used to accurately predict so many things, such as CPU dimensions, mobile phone usage, Internet growth, broadband increases, robotic intelligence, and a myriad of other things.

There are two reasons why it is a good idea to rely on extrapolations:

The first is because they already *have* showed to be accurate in previous decades. Technological future prediction is a proven concept. You simply look at given data, and extrapolate (usually exponentially) from there on.

The second is because human intuition only works well in predicting what linear processes will look like in the future. Humans are always overestimating what can be done in the short term, and grossly underestimating what can be done in the long term.

Therefore, a human being would do wise to throw his intuition overboard when it comes to predicting our technological future. Extrapolations have factually been way (waaaaaaay) more accurate than our intuitions.

-

Q. Why will hardware, on which to run AI, most likely have to be three-dimensional?

A. Because we are figuring out how intelligence works by reverse engineering existing intelligent machines, that just so happen to exist in three dimensions: our brains.

So when we are learning how intelligence works on three-dimensional configurable neural networks, it is very likely that we will end up creating AI on such a substrate.

-

Q. Is it possible to run AI on two-dimensional hardware?

A. It has been proven that any neural network (also the ones that exist in three dimensions) can be replicated in an algorithm running on simple two-dimensional hardware.

So if we were to map the neural network of our own brains into such an algorithm and ran it on a two-dimensional CPU, would this result in a consciouss, intelligent entity?

Some seem to think so, some seem to think not. But is it really relevant?

If it is obviously possible to build AI using three dimensions (and the mainstream CPU's of the near future are likely to be three-dimensional), why even bother to try and get intelligence to run on two-dimensional platforms?

Why would it be important to be able to run AI on one single two-dimensional CPU?

Besides... one could simple take a whole lot of two-dimensional CPU's and configure them to act like neurons in a neural network. If the CPU's were connected to each other to form a neural network with a configuration that allows for intelligence, intelligence (and mayhap) consciousness would probably arise from the total network. Because of the fact that a chip to replace a rat-hippocampus already exists, I think it's safe to assume that a chip could also replace just one neuron.

-

Q. Do you think comparing 'CPU operations' to 'human brain neuron firing' makes for a good comparison?

A. Absolutely. They are both very basic elements of complex machines: modern microprocessors and human brains respectively.

When a neuron fires, it basically transfers an amount of information, comparable to 5 bits, to another neuron. The receiving neuron views this as input, does some computation, and gives output. And so on.

When a CPU loads in an instruction as input (which is basically just a number), it performs some computations, and then gives output. Just like a neuron. A CPU is, ofcourse, just one CPU. But it is easy to see how a network of CPU's could pass on information to each other just like a network of neurons would.

-

Q. Won't an (S)AI take over the world and enslave humanity, just like in the movies?

A. Movies are optimized for cinematographic coolness. They have nothing to do with reality, and should therefore not be viewed as history books from the future.

When writers write science fiction, they realize that the people who will read and/or view their creations will want to be able to identify with the characters. For this reason, in series like Star Trek and movies like Starwars, you always see unaugmented humans living in an extremely hi-tech world. And more often than not, the writers will have these unaugmented humans battling some evil technological monster (think Terminator). Otherwise, there would not be much of a story.

But an AI would not simply decide to just take over the world and enslave humanity, unless we painstakingly program it to do so. Wanting to take over the world implies a longing for power. A longing for power is a very human trait. Because we all have this trait (thanks again, Mother Nature), some of us automatically project this onto any not-yet-invented AI.

But an AI will do nothing more than try to find a way to complete the goals it has in mind, just like a human being does. But where human beings feel the need to reproduce as much as possible by getting a social status as high as possible, an AI does not necessarily have to posess these desires. It won't unless we build it so.

The total brain configuration space is *huge*. Our human brain configuration is a mere drop in a Universe. It is entirely possible for a completely different type of brain, with a completely different type of consciousness, and a completely different set of goals and desires, to exist.

If we know what's best for us, we will build an SAI that is friendly to human beings. It has to have to *want* to be friendly, or (as Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute so eloquently puts it) we've already lost.

An evil AI will, by definition, be evil towards mankind, and is likely to provide us with our own personal hell for all eternity.

A neutral AI will, by definition, not care about mankind. It will not set out to destroy us, but it will also not mind doing so if this somehow suits its needs.

A friendly AI will, by definition, be friendly towards mankind, and is likely to want to solve our problems, provide us with upgraded bodies and minds, and run our world for us.

The latter is something we are in dire need of, as we obviously can't run our world ourselves. We never could do it very efficiently, and because of our exponentially changing world, we will continue to have more and more problems with it in the future.

-

Q. What happens after the Singularity?

A. Nobody knows, because our model of the future breaks down at the point in time where the Singularity takes place.

An SAI is by definition more intelligent than any human. Not only will it be more intelligent, it will be running on hardware which is quite a lot faster than our own human brains. Example: a cubic inch of nanocircuitry would be a million times faster than one human brain. An SAI running on a cube like that would subjectively experience one million seconds (a good portion of a year) in the timespan that we perceive to be one second. In that time, the SAI can recursively improve upon itself and grow yet ever faster and more intelligent.

This constitutes an intelligence explosion. Intelligence goes off into theoretical infinity from hereon. Basically, you are talking about the creation of (a) God. The amount of intelligence will, from a human viewpoint, not be distinguishable from infinity.

Assuming the SAI will be a friendly one, we can safely assume that it would a triviality for an SAI like that to provide us with everything we might desire. The most radical of which will be an intelligence-upgrade and a conscioussness-expansion for ourselves. After all... why stick to human hardware when you can merge with your own technology and have a much nicer brain than the one you have now?

Think of it, you could get rid of all those pesky emotions such as jealousy, anger, vengefulness. You could replace them with much nicer emotions, of which we currently do not even know that they exist. You could get rid of horrible brain diseases, such as Parkinson, schizophrenia, Alzheimer, and religious insanity, by allowing Singularity-technology to replace your brain with advanced nanotechnology (or picotechnology, or maybe even femtotechnology??) in situ. Many people agree that uploading your conscioussness to a virtual environment will also be possible, thus freeing oneself from the drudgery of the slow, physical world.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Nobody knows what it is like to have his/her conscioussness expanded, and his/her intelligence upgraded.

Needless to say that the world would be in for quite a change. But we cannot know what it is like, since nobody has ever gone through it. Most well-read, informed people *do* realize, however, that it is a noble goal worth fighting for.

It must be achieved. It is unethical to *not* fight for it.

There are too many people suffering from all sorts of things in this world. It is not necessary. We can all live rich and meaningful lives, free from pain, agony, and torment, physically as well as mentally.

-

Q. Is creation of SAI the only road to the Singularity?

A. No. One could imagine a scenario where human beings upgrade themselves, gradually merging with their own technology more and more. This way, we would have a human being turned into a superior intelligence.

Some people prefer this strategy to the creation of an AI, because the artificial intelligence just might turn out to be not friendly. This means it would be either evil or neutral. Both are equally unacceptable.

When upgrading a human intelligence, however, we could at least pick one of which we know he's a friendly guy. Friendly superior intelligence would hence be more or less guaranteed.

-

Q. Is it likely that the Singularity will be initiated by friendly SAI?

A. Probably. So far, the forces of evil (terrorists) have always been outfunded by the forces of good (scientists trying to increase John Doe's quality of life). Also, scientists work in a peer reviewed environment, in contrary to terrorists. Terrorists do not have to put their inventions through the FDA.

Technology is itself inherently neutral. It's how it's used that makes all the difference. Some people have claimed that the Internet could never exist, because it would be destroyed by virii. However, virii are software technology. And software technology can also be used to build virusscanners. And indeed, this is exactly what has happened. There is, ofcourse, the occasional virus outbreak, doing several millions of dollars in damage. But overall, we can safely say that the Internet is alive and well thanks to sophisticated virusscanners, which have obviously won from the virii.

The same will likely be true for the creation of AI. It *is* important, however, that friendly SAI is created *before* anything else. Once SAI exists, it will be as good as impossible for anybody to create a friendly SAI to counter an evil/neutral SAI.

-

Q. What's the difference between AI and SAI?

A. AI = Artificial Intelligence. SAI = Superior Artificial Intelligence.

AI can be used to refer to simple 'intelligent' systems such as chess computers, as well as truly, generally intelligent beings that may or may not posess conscioussness.

SAI refers to nothing else than an AI that has an intellect superior to human beings. Such an AI will likely claim to be consciouss, and we will likely believe it because we have no reason to assume that it is not.

There if, ofcourse, no objective way to measure the existence of conscioussness, since it is a subjective experience.

-

Q. What exactly will make an SAI so superior?

A. The idea is that a machine intelligence has the advantages of both humans and machines.

Imagine an AI that is intelligent because it has a neural network that is wired up in a very sophisticated manner, so that intelligence arises from it as it does in our own human brains.

Add to that the fact that the neurons of this AI will run at blazing speeds. The electrical hardware we have today is already millions of times faster than our neurons, which fire at a slow rate of 200 times per second. The future hardware that will be used to build AI, will leave today's hardware to bite the dust. An AI will likely think *zillions* of times faster than any other intelligent entity ever has.

Add to that the fact that machines have perfect memory, and (theoretically) endless amounts of it. Where human beings start to have serious problems memorizing a list of 10 numbers, a machine can easily retrieve gigabytes of data with 100% accuracy, and at rapid speeds.

Add to that the fact that machines can share knowledge. Where every human being needs to go through the same painstaking process of learning how to walk, talk, calculate, and tie his/her shoelaces, machines can simply share there knowledge virtually instantaneously. For instance, you could train a speech recognizing program to get better at its task. This program, and its database of newly acquired knowledge, can then easily be shared with any computer in the world. Any computer running this program can then recognize speech as well as the computer that actually went through the learning process. AI's will be able to make copies of themselves, and turn themselves into groups of intelligent entities, all working together on cracking the next big problem.

Add to that the fact that AI's, once smart enough, will be able to understand their own brains, just like us humans can with our own brains. However, it doesn't stop there. AI's will be built in such a way they can rewire their own brains, therefore recursively improving upon themselves. Us humans are quite limited in changing our own brains. When we want to acquire a new skill, such as programming, playing guitar, etc., we have to exercise at it for years. All this practice usually results in a few minor changes in how our neurons are wired up. All in all, it's a very slow process for us humans. Machines will not have these limitations.

And that's how an AI can easily turn into an SAI.

-

Q. Today's AI's, such as chess computers, are just programs that have nothing to do with with general AI. Therefore, a consciouss, general AI can never exist, can it?

A. That line of reasoning is demonstrably flawed.

This argument is of the form "we don't have X today, therefore we shall never have X". Try going back to the early sixties and claim that man will never walk on the moon. Try going back to 1900 and claim that man will never fly.

We all know how that went, don't we?

The observation that today's 'intelligences' are merely logical algorithms, is actually quite a sharp observation. But it is actually a non-issue. At this moment, the reverse engineering of the human brain is in full progress, and expected to be done around 2030. The human brain has several dozens of regions, of which about a dozen have been fully reverse engineered. The workings of these brain regions have been succesfully reproduced with the help of computer algorithms.

What we have already demonstrated, is that we have the ability to understand our own intelligence. However, we are not yet at the point where we can use that knowledge in order to build generally intelligent machines with sophisticated neural networks.

Everything points to a scenario where consciouss, intelligent, cognitive machines will indeed be built.

And when a machine like that loads a Deep Blue chess program into its knowledge base, thereby combining cognitive powers with CPU powers, hold on to your socks...

-

Q. What can I do to help getting the Singularity off the ground?

A. Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute has compiled a nice list of 10 ways to help the Singularity. It can be found here:

http://www.singinst.org/action/waystohelp.html

-

Q. In the past, people have made other predictions such as flying cars, leisure society, SAI, and they did not come to pass, so neither will these SAI-by-2030 predictions.

A. That's not a question, but I'm going to answer it anyway.

The reason why some researchers started making far out predictions, was because computers showed great potential even right after being invented. In the fifties, computers were already proving mathematical theorems and beating people at chess (just the ones that were not so good, though). Researchers back then had no idea that exponential extrapolation was important if you wanted to accurately predict the technological future. They probably didn't have much data of the previous decades to do it with, anyway.

Exponential growth was still going slowly, and researchers were still using their intuitions to linearly extrapolate into the future. Many of them figured that a computer would beat grandmaster chessplayers by ~1970. Many predicted flying cars, SAI, and the leisure society by 2000.

None of these predictions panned out. Not in the correct timeframe, anyway.

We can draw a valuable lesson from this: when somebody is trying to sell you his predictions, and he does not have the data and the extrapolations to back it up, you should not take this person seriously.

On a sidenote... a chesscomputer eventually *did* beat a grandmaster, only it happened decades later.

Flying cars exist (and they're called SkyCars), they're just not mainstream. The creator of the SkyCar is currently testing with prototypes. He predicts we'll start to see the first flying cars about 15 years from now. However, police, military, and rescueworkers will have it sooner. There is a movieclip on the Internet demonstrating a rescue operation.

We don't have SAI yet, but it's starting to look more and more like we will in only a few decades.

And that leisure society that we were promised so many decades ago, might eventually pan out as well. Think about what happens when robots start to take over more and more jobs, automizing the entire economy. Think about what happens when molecular manufacturing brings us the ability to produce *any* product at the price of a few cents per pound. Will we still need the economy in its current form?

See the links at the bottom of this FAQ for more information on Robotic Nation and Molecular Manufacturing.

-

Q. I read something about uploading oneself to a virtual environment... can conscioussness really be uploaded, and will that really be me?

A. Many people have thought about this. And nobody has a conclusive answer.

If you were to upload your mind in the sense that we upload files, a copy would be made. Would this be you? Most people think not. The real you (that is: your unique stream of conscioussness) will still be in your flesh and blood body. The copied you would share your all your memories and all your knowledge. He would probably *feel* like he was you. Yet he's there in the computer, and you are still sitting outside it.

However, if we were to use advanced nanotechnology and advanced knowledge of brains/intelligence to gradually replace your biological brain with a different type of nanotechnological brain, you will remain yourself all through the process.

This process is not at all that different from what's going on right now: you are gradually being replaced by other molecular particles all the time. Every few years, we consist of a completely different set of molecular particles than we did a few years back. Yet we all agree that we remain ourselves, from decade to decade. Our 'selves' are obviously not tied to matter. Rather, it is the 'pattern of our mind' that changes only gradually over time... slowly enough for us to feel that we remain ourselves through time.

Your shiny new nanotech brain could potentially run its very own virtual environment, not needing anymore input from senses that observe the outside world. It could also have an interface to a network, say the Internet, so you could migrate there and meet other people in there own virtual environments.

So basically... you would still be you, and you'd also be 'uploaded' to a virtual environment.

This all seems very far out, but remember... I'm assuming advanced nanotechnology and advanced knowledge of brains and intelligence. A scenario like this will never happen without these two technologies, anyway.

-

Q. What links can you provide me with that I will probably find interesting to read?

A. Anybody who is new to the whole Singularity scenario, would do well to teach himself the basics by reading Ray Kurzweil's very excellent (and legendary) "The Law Of Accelerating Returns". This essay explains exponential extrapolations in detail. You won't be the same person after reading these insights for the first time.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1


Another source of valuable information is the Singularity Institute For Artificial Intelligence. A nice list of introduction material can be found at the following link. It talks about friendly AI, seed AI, nanotechnology, general intelligence, the impact of the Singularity, etc.

http://www.singinst.org/intro/


For all of you who wish to delve into the murky depths, there are the writings of one self-taught genius named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who also happens to be the driving force behind the Singularity Institute. He has written extensively on AI and the creation thereof. Among his work are titles such as "Creating Friendly AI" and "General Intelligence and Seed AI". Both of these are heavy material and will likely require multiple reading sessions in order for you to assimilate them.

http://www.yudkowsky.net/beyond.html


An essay by Yudkowsky that is more comprehensive to the layman is "Staring into the Singularity". This document does a very excellent job of explaining what exactly the impact of the Singularity will be (in as far this can be comprehended by mere human intellect ofcourse).

http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity.html


Nanotechnology can, and probably will, provide high resolution tools that can be used for brainscanning and reverse engineering. Nanotechnology can also be used to build suitable substrates (dynamically configurable neural network CPU's) for AI's to run on. By the way things are looking now, nanotechnology will, by 2015, bring us fullblown molecular manufacturing. This means that we will be able to design any product at the molecular level, and that it will be produced by a NanoFactory at very low cost.

http://www.crnano.org/Bridges.htm

http://crnano.typepad.com


The Singularity scenario is not the only thing to keep in mind when thinking about the impact of AI. The process towards the Singularity, before it hits real fast and real hard, will be one in which machines become gradually smarter each year. Therefore, there are not only implications for the longer term (2030), but also for the short- to mid-term (2015). Marshall Brain has done an excellent job of analyzing what will likely happen in the not too distant future, when machines get smarter.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/


After reading this FAQ, you will probably want to read, with your very own eyes, something that shows how exactly researchers are treating brains like circuitry, due to our increasing knowledge on brains. Here is a link to an article that talks about the rat hippocampus prosthesis.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3488

-

My First Blogpost

Well, well, well... my first Blog. :)

After having played with the idea of blogging for a long time, I have finally decided to actually do it.

I've got some insights on technology, and how it will impact our world. And I'm gonna share it with all of you. I hope I will manage to bring some enlightenment to a few people, and that there will be many interesting conversations.

Oh, and lots of stimulating feedback, ofcourse. ;)

Greetz,

Jay