Last week I posted an essay in which I claimed that the Singularity could be said to be halfway here already because we had already set up a huge program that was more or less running the world (and that it was fast becoming a computer program).

What are the great concerns of the Singularitarians? That we will create a great machine that will take over because it is more intelligent than humans. How is a mere mind going to take over?  By fooling us.
I claim that if you look carefully enough, we have in fact already done this. What is a corporation or government but a program, a huge piece of software. The fact that the primitives in the programming language are human acts allows it to be written at a level of abstraction as yet unavailable to programs for electronic computers, but not for long. The essence of a program is a set of instructions telling some agent what to do.
Look at your Form 1040 sometime. It could have been written in COBOL instead of English with virtually no semantic change. What’s the processor it runs on? You are. You’re just a substrate. So is Obama.

Oddly enough, widely regarded IT commentator Bruce Webster has just posted an essay pointing out the similarity between law and software. His point is mostly that it’s shot through with the most horrible examples of programming — spaghetti and self-modifying code, for example — you could imagine.

On the occasions where I have reviewed the actual text of major legislation, I have been struck by the parallels between legislation and software, particularly in terms of the pitfalls and issues with architecture, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. Some of the tradeoffs are even the same, such as trading off the risk of “analysis paralysis” (never moving beyond the research and analysis phase) and the risks of unintended consequences from rushing ill-formed software into production. Yet another similarity is that both software and legislation tend to leverage off of, interact with, call upon, extend, and/or replace existing software and legislation.  Finally, the more complex a given system or piece of legislation is, the less likely that it will achieve the original intent.

In a historical note, I’ll point out that I first ran across the idea in a well-organized form in a talk talk by Robert Kowalski, one of the fathers of logic programming, over 20 years ago.

And finally, Michael A. left a comment on the original post:

Interesting post. Isn’t it a bit old-fashioned to think that we will require human figureheads forever?

Depends on who you mean by “we”.  In the long run, people will come to realize that the figureheads are figureheads and unnecessary. At that point, being a figurehead will no longer satisfy the “beneffectiveness” levels of the Maslow hierarchy and, assuming the system still has a goal of serving humans, something else will have to be found.

The really deep question is whether there will be a role where people are really useful as opposed to merely being made to feel that way, as most of us are in the current system.

Recent advances in nanoplasmonics, h/t arXiv blog:

Plasmonic Laser Heralds New Generation of Computing

If you’re into buzzwords, nanoplasmonics is one you ought to know about. Nanoplasmonics, we’re told, is the next big thing–the field that will allow us to sense and manipulate the world on the smallest of scales.
Plasmons, of course, are waves in the sea of free electrons inside and on the surface of metals. These waves are nanoscopic in size and have a frequency measured in attoseconds (equivalent to the optical range of UV to infrared). They are quantized, which means they can demonstrate the strange properties of quantum mechanics. And they are incredibly sensitive to the world around them. This makes plasmons perfect for sensing everything from photons, magnetic fields and electrons. They promise a new generation of photodetectors, scanning microscopes and various biomedical devices.

…
A spaser is, in effect, a nanoscale plasmon amplifier. But it can also generate plasmons as well as store them. That’s roughly what an ordinary field effect transistor does with electrons but Stockman has calculated that it can do all this roughly three orders of magnitude faster. Yep, that’s a thousand times faster.

[Mark] Stockman has an powerful vision for his device:

“One may envision ultrafast nanoplasmonic chips with a high degree of integration where spasers communicate and control each other through their near fields or are connected with nanoplasmonic wires. These can perform ultrafast microprocessor functions.”

What he’s describing, of course, is a new generation of ultrafast computers based on plasmonics.

SENS4 is going on in Cambridge, England.

The purpose of the SENS conference series, like all the SENS initiatives (such as the journal Rejuvenation Research), is to expedite the development of truly effective therapies to postpone and treat human aging by tackling it as an engineering problem: not seeking elusive and probably illusory magic bullets, but instead enumerating the accumulating molecular and cellular changes that eventually kill us and identifying ways to repair – to reverse – those changes, rather than merely to slow down their further accumulation.

Coverage can be found at Ouroboros aging research blog
and fightingaging.org:

SENS4, Session 1: Combating oxidation

Cathy Clarke tested an original and interesting approach to avoiding free radical damage to poly-unsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs: isotope reinforcement. … The basic idea here, explained in an earlier paper, is very simple: heavier isotopes make stronger bonds, so isotope-reinforced PUFAs will be more resistant to free radical attack. Will these results transfer to higher organisms? Is there any chance that the deuterium could get incorporated into other molecules, stabilizing proteins that we want to degrade? The authors plan to follow up this study in worms and mice.

SENS4, Session 3: Optimising metabolism against aging

Stephen Spindler described his (ongoing) project to screen a large number of potential lifespan-affecting compounds in mice – so far, several candidates look promising. Interestingly, he also argued that the majority of previous studies measuring the effects of various compounds on rodent life expectancy suffer from serious flaws. In particular, he argued that many of them were confounded by a possible calorie restriction effect: mice are picky eaters, and if you change their diet by adding some compound to it, they will often eat less of it.

SENS4, Session 4: Adult regenerative capacity

Brandon Reines presented a counterintuitive result on regeneration: sometimes old animals have a higher regenerative capacity than young animals. In particular, if you punch a hole in the ear of a young mouse, then it won’t heal; but in a middle-aged mouse it will heal completely. He argued that this happens because mouse ear connective tissues never fully differentiate, and suggested that other neural-crest-derived connective tissues might show similar properties.

SENS4, Session 5: Eliminating recalcitrant intracellular molecules: the lysosome

John Schloendorn discussed ongoing work at the SENS Foundation Research Center to develop new enzymes that can degrade harmful intracellular junk that accumulates with age. So far, they have discovered enzymes that can degrade A2E and 7-ketocholesterol, which are implicated in macular degeneration and osteoporosis, respectively. Their next step will be to construct a drug delivery system to get these enzymes to lysozomes … On the lighter side, Schloendorn also described some of the Center’s methods for building functional lab equipment on the cheap, all good examples for aspiring DIY biologists.

SENS4, Session 6: Eliminating recalcitrant intracellular molecules: other

Claude Wischik spoke about preventing aggregation of tau protein, which is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. Clinical trials of their aggregation-inhibiting drug Rember are promising: it seems to slow the down the rate of cognitive decline in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease.

SENS4, Sessions 9 and 10: Rejuvenating extracellular material

Kendall Houk gave a very interesting talk on computationally designing enzymes from scratch. They plan to apply their recently published protocol to develop enzymes that can reverse the formation of Advanced Glycation End-products (AGEs) – sugar-modified proteins that accumulate with age and are implicated in several age-related diseases.

[h/t Al Fin]

The blogosphere (and science news-cliposphere) is all agog aver the discovery of magnetic monopoles, from Nature to Slashdot.  Nanowerk Physicsworld

Dirac strings

What’s happened is the publication of some papers and preprints about observation and measurement of monopoles in spin ices, particularly in the complex crystal structures of compounds such as Ho2Ti2O7 and Dy2Ti2O7 at cryogenic temperatures.

Dirac Strings and Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice Dy2Ti2O7

Magnetic Charge Transport

Observation of Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice

This is really cool stuff, but it needs to be pointed out that these monopoles and connecting Dirac strings are not new fundamental particles that can exist apart from the crystal structures. They are patterns in the spin states of the atoms in the structures, as explained (and predicted) in this paper:

Magnetic monopoles in spin ice (pdf)

So don’t throw away your superconducting electromagnets just yet.

Previous: What Singularity?

Yesterday I took issue with Alfred Nordmann’s IEEE post in which he claimed that technological progress was slowing down instead of accelerating. I claimed instead that it was being distorted by the needs of the next rungs of the Maslow hierarchy, and that a huge portion of society’s energy was going into something that no one had predicted: giving the Eloi the illusion that they are doing something that matters.  Just for fun, let’s give this theory a name: ESP, for Eloi Save the Planet.

So, what was the definition of the Singularity again?  Progress of a kind that couldn’t be predicted?  I did say earlier that we were essentially in the middle of the Singularity, on any historical perspective.

What are the great concerns of the Singularitarians? That we will create a great machine that will take over because it is more intelligent than humans. How is a mere mind going to take over?  By fooling us.

I claim that if you look carefully enough, we have in fact already done this. What is a corporation or government but a program, a huge piece of software. The fact that the primitives in the programming language are human acts allows it to be written at a level of abstraction as yet unavailable to programs for electronic computers, but not for long. The essence of a program is a set of instructions telling some agent what to do.

Look at your Form 1040 sometime. It could have been written in COBOL instead of English with virtually no semantic change. What’s the processor it runs on? You are. You’re just a substrate. So is Obama.

It would be a mistake to identify the Singleton, to use Bostrom’s term, with just the government, or just the corporations, or the legal or the financial sectors, or even the Internet.  It’s a mistake to anthropomorphize it. It’s the self-organizing system consisting of all of them.  And it is quickly, not slowly, changing substrate from humans following rules on paper to computers running programs in RAM. Just consider how much of the economy happens over the Internet now than 20 years ago. Think of automatic teller machines. Think of combat robots and UAVs.

The process of turning the world over to the machines is happening from the bottom up — the tellers are replaced first, the bank presidents last — so it’s not so obvious or dramatic as if it were happening the other way. In fact, it may never happen completely; there will probably always be human figureheads even when the machines do all the work and make all the decisions. Indeed, ESP strongly predicts that there will be lots of figureheads who firmly believe they are really in charge and responsible for what their machines are doing.

How, then, should we expect the rest of the Singularity to unfold? Remember that the Singularity, in Vinge’s original sense, was purely a phenomenon of machine intelligence.  It doesn’t particularly matter if we have flying cars, or cruise-spaceships to the rings of Saturn.  It doesn’t matter if we cure cancer or aging.  It doesn’t matter if we have robot butlers and maids, although that’s a more likely side effect.  What matters is that there will be smarter-than-human AIs making the decisions that do matter.

The fact is that the ESP pressures that are slowing down all the other kinds of progress are, willy-nilly, accelerating progress in computers and software. Look on Sourceforge or the iPhone App Store to get a feeling for just how much technical creativity is being poured into software today. Computing today is one of the very few fields where tinkering leads theory, in the normal historical configuration of a progressive technical growth mode.  Given my own personal proclivities, for example, I might equally as well be tinkering on a flying car or working on AI. The existing configuration of pressures, incentives, and roadblocks pushes me to the latter.

So, far from slowing down, technological advance has kicked into historically unprecedented growth rates in the one area that leads most strongly to the AI and the machine takeover.  (Actually, there are several areas, such as neuroscience, that are contributory; and they’re all seeing rapid progress.)

What will the world be like after the substrate shift of the Singleton? Not much difference, at least initially. Machines will assume the real decision-making power, piecemeal, as they are able to do the job at as well as people (or in some cases, just “well enough”). The “system” will actually work a little better overall. ESP tells us that there will be lots of human-level (and human-shaped) robots for people to order around and to need and appreciate us.

Will the system as a whole ever get beyond ESP, the need to let humanity live a scary but fulfilling lie? That remains impossible to predict.

There’s an interesting piece up at the IEEE robotics blog, by Alfred Nordmann, with the subtitle “The story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple–and wrong.” He argues that far from accelerating, technological progress is slowing down:

The trouble begins with the singularitarians’ assumption that technological advances have accelerated. I’d argue that I have seen less technological progress than my parents did, let alone my grandparents. Born in 1956, I can testify primarily to the development of the information age, fueled by the doubling of computing power every 18 to 24 months, as described by Moore’s Law. The birth-control pill and other reproductive technologies have had an equally profound impact, on the culture if not the economy, but they are not developing at an accelerating speed. Beyond that, I saw men walk on the moon, with little to come of it, and I am surrounded by bio- and nanotechnologies that so far haven’t affected my life at all. Medical research has developed treatments that make a difference in our lives, particularly at the end of them. But despite daily announcements of one breakthrough or another, morbidity and mortality from cancer and stroke continue practically unabated, even in developed countries.
Now consider the life of someone who was born in the 1880s and died in the 1960s—my grandmother, for instance. She witnessed the introduction of electric light and telephones, of auto­mobiles and airplanes, the atomic bomb and nuclear power, vacuum electronics and semi­conductor electronics, plastics and the computer, most vaccines and all anti­biotics. All of those things mattered greatly in human terms, as can be seen in a single statistic: child mortality in industrialized countries dropped by 80 percent in those years.

Nordmann then proceeds to diagnose the problem (of belief in accelerating progress when in fact it’s slowing down) as one of increasing specialization:

Plainly put, it is getting harder than ever to know whom to believe. Policy makers and members of the public have always had to put a degree of trust in experts. But now, when considering highly complex ­phenomena—in cellular processes, in chips containing billions of transistors, or in programs numbering hundreds of thousands of lines of code—even the experts must take a great deal on trust. That is because they have no choice but to study such ­phenomena using a cross-disciplinary approach.
These experts greet extraordinary claims made from within their own disciplines with skepticism and even indignation. But they can find it very hard to maintain such methodological vigilance in the hothouse atmosphere of a high-stakes collaboration in which ­researchers want desperately to believe that their own contributions can have wonderfully synergistic effects when combined with those of experts in other fields.

Now frankly, what he says about the effects of technology on the average person are quite true. The Leave It to Beaver family of the 50s had a life that was essentially as comfortable as ours is today. It seems clear that by that time, the middle classes of the developed nations had reached some kind of a “good enough” point in basic physical arrangements — that point at which concern shifted over to higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, perhaps.

Visions of what happens when all the basic needs are satisfied go back to H. G. Wells and The Time Machine, describing the Eloi:

‘It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life–the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure–had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!
…

‘But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.  Now, where are these imminent dangers? There is a sentiment arising, and it will grow, against connubial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts; unnecessary things now, and things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a refined and pleasant life.

…
‘Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help–may even be hindrances–to a civilized man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as
the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived–the flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.

It could be argued that Wells foresaw not only the huge shift away from productive pursuits over the twentieth century, but the sexual revolution and the breakup of the family.  The only thing that would have boggled his mind is that it only took one century instead of the 8000 he imagined.

But if you ask the average person of the industrialized world, they won’t agree that they are the Eloi, living perfect lives of ease in a Utopian garden. They would tell you that they struggled to make ends meet, life was hard, they were doing necessary jobs, and so forth.

The next needs up the Maslow hierarchy after safety and comfort are belonging and esteem.  The basic human psyche is evolved for the pre-economic tribal environment where esteem came from fulfilling a useful role and being appreciated for it, by others but also by oneself.

It is the absolute genius of the post-industrial age that we have created a society in which a growing majority of people are doing useless, and in many cases counter-productive work (plus producing luxuries and entertainment), but where we all feel like we’re doing something necessary and important, and that we’re making a difference in the world.

Unlike a century ago, today for everyone who is working on technological progress, there is someone else who thinks that they are saving the planet by stopping them.  Has the pace of technological change slowed?  It certainly has for technologies that have to run the gauntlet all the way into consumers’ hands and make an obvious difference, because those are the easiest kinds to attack.  It has also slowed in areas where scare stories are easy to generate, like nuclear power.  In a world of delusional, self-important Eloi, it is much more advantageous to be a screaming coward than to be brave and productive.

At the back end of the process, however, science is still advancing (animal activists to the contrary notwithstanding).  The rate of technological advance in areas without opposition, such as computer technology, has been tremendous.  Over the period that Nordmann decries as having had little technological advance, basic science has done things like solve the molecular mechanisms of life itself, produced a workable quantum electrodynamics, and mapped the human brain.

Normally in history, technology has led science. Tinkerers find things that work, and scientists come along and explain them, in the process laying the groundwork for more thorough exploitation of the principles involved.  The steam engine preceded thermodynamics by a century.  What’s happened in the late twentieth century is that something of an overhang has been created by the opposition to visible applications. Should there be a cultural shift, or should there arise elsewhere (China?) a culture that has the same gung-ho spirit that we had just a century ago, huge apparent advances could happen almost overnight as experimentation regains the lead, using all the “pent-up knowledge” of the past half-century.  Real nanotechnology is the most obvious example, but there are many.

Here at Foresight our main focus is on longer-term technologies such as molecular manufacturing, but we keep an eye on what’s arriving along the nearer-term pathways as well.  In 2007 I attended a workshop on “Nanotechnology for Chemical and Biological Defense” and the proceedings volume of that meeting, with the same name, is now available.  An excerpt:

For the misuse of nanotechnology, the groups explored scenarios in which state or nonstate adversaries might use nanotechnology applications against the US and allies.  These groups also considered proliferation challenges.  The specific threats considered were new or nanoenabled biochemical agents; malfeasant exploitation of the toxicological or other deleterious health effects; evasion of vaccines, innate human immunity, or other medical countermeasures; and self-assembled materials and devices to molecular assemblers.

Scenarios involving “abiotic or mechanical self-replicating synthetic self-assembly” were regarded as beyond the timeframe covered by the book.

Those of us who answer questions from the public about potential abuse of nanotech frequently point out that there is a much more immediate concern coming from biological technologies.  This book looks at those issues and how nanotech might help.

As one who rarely envisions biotech threats, I found the workshop scary.  But it’s good that someone is paying attention to these concerns.  Check out the book, edited by Margaret Kosal of Georgia Tech.  —Chris Peterson

IEEE Spectrum: Boston Startup iWalk Lands Funding for Robotic Prosthetics.

If you wonder how soon we will have walking robots, remember that the technology underlying the Segway was developed for a stair-climbing wheelchair.

From the article:

I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Herr speak at an MIT robotics conference last November. At the time, I knew nothing of his background or research. Halfway in to the presentation as he was describing his research, he rolled up the cuffs of his slacks to reveal metal and electronics. Until that point I’d had no idea he was a double amputee; as he’d walked to the front of the room, his gait — though not completely normal — was so smooth, I’d never have guessed he was dealing with anything but a couple of stiff joints.

If you were an alien from an advanced civilization who had been stranded on Earth, but had all your people’s knowledge on a thumb drive, how would you go about creating nanotech and building up Earth’s technology to the level you could rejoin your galactic civilization?

If you actually knew the details, probably one of the most direct pathways that’s accessible by our current technology would be to build a whole set of custom proteins that would bootstrap the molecular machinery.  We can, tantalizingly, build any protein we like but we just don’t know how to design the ones that would do what we need.

This is by way of being a very verbose pointer to a very nice article at Ars Technica about some of the latest research in protein folding. Highly recommended.

A couple of bloggers have noted the article at Wired about the Good Enough “revolution.”

After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder—like the Single Use Digital Camera—had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage at a time when Sony, Panasonic, and Canon were launching camcorders capable of recording in 1080 hi-def. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. It didn’t even have an optical zoom. But it was small (slightly bigger than a pack of smokes), inexpensive ($150, compared with $800 for a midpriced Sony), and so simple to operate—from recording to uploading—that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.

Within a few months, Pure Digital could barely keep up with orders. Customers found that the Flip was the perfect way to get homebrew videos onto the suddenly flourishing YouTube, and the camera became a megahit, selling more than 1 million units in its first year. Today—just two years later—the Flip Ultra and its subsequent revisions are the best-selling video cameras in the US, commanding 17 percent of the camcorder market. Sony and Canon are now scrambling to catch up.

…

And it’s happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.

…

By reducing the size of audio files, MP3s allowed us to get music into our computers—and, more important, onto the Internet—at a manageable size. This in turn let us listen to, manage, and manipulate tracks on our PCs, carry thousands of songs in our pockets, purchase songs from our living rooms, and share tracks with friends and even strangers. And as it turned out, those benefits actually mattered a lot more to music lovers than the single measure of quality we had previously applied to recorded music—fidelity. It wasn’t long before record labels were wringing their hands over declining CD sales.

,,,

To a degree, the MP3 follows the classic pattern of a disruptive technology, as outlined by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Disruptive technologies, Christensen explains, often enter at the bottom of the market, where they are ignored by established players. These technologies then grow in power and sophistication to the point where they eclipse the old systems.

It’s a lot older than the marketplace, of course.  This is what evolution does in spades — if you think you belong to an evolutionarily successful species, consider the cockroach.  Indeed, the human brain is 10% smaller than the Neanderthal brain.  Are we a Good Enough intelligence?  Probably not exactly: my guess is that we have a Good Trick they didn’t have, but otherwise are less feature-rich.

The same seems almost certain to hold with AI. The huge majority of AIs are going to be just about human level in raw intelligence, because it’s an optimum spot in the spectrum of possibilities.

On the other hand, they will be telepathic with downloadable skills.