Meeting Michio

Forgive me for the title, I know it makes it sound like the venerable Dr. Kaku and I are on a first name basis, but he is truly a very friendly fellow and we did actually get to talk a little about self replicating nano-technology.

Let me not jump ahead though. As I already wrote I noticed in my Twitter feed that the Discovery / Science Channel was having a contest to be a guest on the set of “SCI FI SCIENCE: physics of the impossible.” To enter you had to tell them why they should pick you, what you would wear (costumes were encouraged) and then write a VERY short essay on how you would terraform a planet and how you would colonize the galaxy.
I entered and got called back, interviewed over the phone and finally told where and when to be for the shoot.

Gina was originally going to come with me but she has been ill and despite really trying to get it together for the shoot she just couldn’t do it. In any case, she did spruce up my Star Fleet uniform and off I went.
Now the shoot was in Manhattan at 5:30 and I left the house at about 3:15. Plenty of time I thought but as fate would have it there was a jam at the Lincoln Tunnel and I lost more than 90 minutes. I’m sure I was quite a sight, sitting there in full Star Fleet regalia raging silently at what I was sure would now be a missed opportunity. I saw 5:30 come and go and I was still crawling up to the tunnel. I held fast though, I would get there and see what, if anything could be salvaged of the situation. I finally get in to the city, find a place to park near the cross street I’m looking for and catch a cab to my actual destination. I arrive 45 minutes late only to find that everyone is still outside.

Victory! I had not missed a thing.

I chatted with some very nice Mandalorian Mercs from Virgina and took a few pictures, posting them directly to my Facebook page. I met some excellent people and even got invited to a “Yuri Party” in the city.
Yuri Parties are global events, I had never heard of, that celebrate Yuri Gagarin’s first journey into space and the larger ones even feature a costume contest like the Farpoint or Shore Leave conventions.

Once on the set they had lager and wine waiting for us and the whole thing was more like a party than a shoot with the director, Adam Warner, interrupting only occasionally to give us direction. Dominic Aston and everyone on the set was very friendly, professional and easy going. It turns out the whole production is run out of England so everyone had those charming accents and were just generally more polite that the typical New York inner city dwellers.

Finally we got to meet Dr. Kaku who comes in and presents his ideas on the big screen of how to terraform Mars. I was fortunate enough to be up front, center of the crowd for this episode and had the opportunity to be the first one to ask a question. (They liked it so much that had us repeat the entire exchange on the reverse angle shot.)

Now this was a Television show, so everything had to be repeated four times of so from different angles, between takes Dr. Kaku would invite questions and chat it up with us. I noticed that this could be pretty hard on him as some of the questions were either based on a ridiculous movie premise or a really poor understanding of basic physical laws. He handles these situations gracefully though, like a politician he would ask them to repeat the question and then simply give a short answer to the question he wished they had asked, followed by a polite but firm “next question”. With those of us who were better able to keep up however he talked at length about his ideas and what he though future trends might lead to.

We filmed two episodes, one on terraforming Mars, (look for me in this episode next year) and another on colonizing space (if you see me at all in this episode it will be the wildest stroke of luck.)
I won’t post any spoilers here but his solutions were elegant and economical as always and he seemed a genuinely pleasant person. At the end he posed for pictures as we chatted some more.
I know this will only serve to reinforce my hardcore geek status but I must say it was a real honor to have the chance to meet and talk with him.

Robotic Breakthrough May Change The Game

French Scientists Build First Transistor That Mimics Brain Connections
Popular Science By Jeremy Hsu
Let's get that positronic brain rolling
The thing about this is that it's going to mean a possible radical change in possible design parameters. One of the most exciting things is the possibility of finally crossing the brain / computer interface divide.
In fiction we've almost always seen artificial brains that are designed separately and that are just as isolated as our own human brains. In reality the solving of the AI problem may be more of a merger between living brains and artificial augmentation right from the get go.    

Tipping Point?

Excellent Article by Wilson da Silva in Cosmos

New h+ issue is online

http://hplusmagazine.com/
Always worth a look.

Cybersecurity vs. Human Extinction

Interesting article on the Daily Kos (of all places) here.

What's interesting about this article is some of the timelines they suggest and the concepts it practically takes for granted. Also I notice that nanotechnology is not mentioned. It seems like the closer we get to this Singularity thing the harder it is to get your heads around everything that it implies. This article seems to take a raw power approach to advancing technology. For all of that the timelines it suggest are still staggering.

Food for Thought

Excellent Article from New Scientist:
Will designer brains divide humanity?

I like this article because of the ideas it takes for granted.
Consider some of the broader implications of what we're looking at here and I think you will agree that this is worth pondering. Also it raises that underling question; how much enhancement can we take and still remain . . . ourselves?

Transcendent Man

Singularity Hub review

"TRANSCENDENT MAN"

A documentary on Ray Kurzweil. Looks interesting but sounds a little one sided. Still let us not prejudge it. I'm looking forward to this and, of course, "The Singularity is Near" later this year.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/transcendent-man-premieres-at-2009-tribeca-film-festival,743193.shtml

Outlook 2009 and beyond

The Futurist has published their top 10 predictions.
It's a pretty conservative list in my view.
It doesn't take into account the rapid rate of change we're seeing on so many different fronts. The other night Patrick asked me to come up with a list of my own expectations and I've been thinking about it.

First the disclaimers:
All of this is, of course, wild speculation based on the assumption that we don't wipe ourselves out, or push our selves back into another dark age, or suffer some unforeseen natural disaster or ecological meltdown. I know that's a lot of assuming but just play along for now. Also I think it would be useful, and perhaps more entertaining, to use Science Fiction as a kind of short hand for getting some pretty complex and challenging ideas across.

With all of that said let us speculate.
In the near future we will see:


Klingons and Vulcans: (Wait, come back here, I'm serious!) Well not Klingons from Qo'noS, and not Vulcans exactly, but humans who have elected to directly alter and enhance their physical appearance and health. As genetic engineering and bio-enhancement becomes more commercially viable people will no longer be limited to simple steroids. They will begin to use things like myostatin inhibitors and other much more advanced techniques to make themselves stronger, faster, smarter and so on. Some may even begin to splice DNA from other species into their own DNA just as people today experiment with recreational drugs, use steroids, get tattoos or piercings - and probably with about as much forethought. People will likely want stronger, more efficient heart and lung function, greater emotional control, higher metabolism, or enhanced vision or hearing, just for a few examples. Naturally these new changes will, by design, be inheritable in their off spring. Within a single generation, if for practical or aesthetic reasons, one of your parents decided to add a brow ridge or pointed ears . . . guess what? Now ask yourself how many changes we will see in two generations? Needless to say this will lead to whole new types of discrimination. Don't believe people will take these kinds of risk, take another look at the global sales figures for products like Viagra, Xanax, or Enzyte.

As an aside, one of the complaints about Star Trek aliens has always been that they all look basically human with other parts added. Strangely enough though they may have gotten it right. I do not expect to see bipedal aliens landing on the mall in DC anytime soon. However I do think that we will see more extropians and trans-humans looking more and more like they stepped off of the set of one of any number of our more popular Science Fiction television shows.


Artificial Life: We're not talking Cylons here, not yet anyway. However we will very shortly see the advent of artificial (designer) life. Built from carefully selected proteins and amino acids to have very specific qualities. These new lifeforms will have vast and dramatic commercial applications. For instance a form of life that can ingest carbon pollution and excrete usable fuel is being designed right now by JCVI right now.


Star Wars style Droids:
Robots designed for specific functions are already commercially available. Ask anyone who owns a Roomba.
In the movie "I, Robot" we saw that there were several levels of AI. The androids had autonomous intelligence that was (for the sake of drama) co-opted and taken over by the central, much more powerful AI. My question is, if you have the central, really powerful AI, why bother with the autonomous android AI at all? Just let the central AI manage all the androids, all the time. All the androids need is the basic mechanics and firmware to manage their own extremities and few simple routines. That and the ability to have their software wirelessly updated and tailored as needed for specific applications (Paint the house, mow the lawn, wash the dishes, whatever). Any droid that fails to function properly can be monitored and shut down remotely using existing military grade GPS applications. Then other droids can even be dispatched to recover, repair or replace it. Robots can be any shape needed for any given function. Robot flying cars for everyone! Droid housekeepers and landscapers for all!


The Borg: Don't think rows of Borg standing in regeneration chambers in the their Borg cubes here, think more along the lines of Seven of Nine.
PDA's, and on line social networks are already leading to this. People will have the ability to be as connected as they like to various collectives - like their family, friends or co-workers. We are already moving past glasses and contact lenses that merely correct faulty vision into technology that enhances vision well past human norms or adds data augmentation and a VR overlay. To say nothing of changing the color of your eyes. If that means a few tech looking add-ons like the current bluetooth headsets - so be it! Don't think it will go this way? Consider the fact that, although it is seldom enforced, it is currently illegal to operate a car and a cell phone simultaneously without a bluetooth headset.


Nanites: Self replicating, really small, machines that can build anything out of everything. Now we're talking! (We've seen these everywhere in Science Fiction from Star Trek to Stargate to Jake 2.0.) We're already on the cusp of a surge in three dimensional printing technology that will revolutionize retail as we know it. (Soon you won't need the item itself, just the file for the item and a 3D printer.) This is the step just after that where anything, (Including things made out of metamaterials and even more Nanites!) can be designed and assembled from the molecular level up. The commercial and medical applications speak for themselves and are already funding advances in this technology at a spectacular rate. Talk about green, imagine physical object that only exist on an as needed basis. Their component elements completely reclaimed and reused again and again. Swarms of nanites swimming through your blood repairing cell damage, hunting down cancer cells or just maintaining muscle tone and flexibility without the need for dieting or exercise.


True AI: This is the big one as it informs and augments all the others. You want to really make use of all of those droids and nanites? You want to splice or tweak genes without giving yourself cancer? You need to crack this one. Right now we have very specific, simple forms of artificial intelligence that do things like play Chess, play Checkers, monitor the stock market, and so on. I call these types of AI, virtual intelligence or VI to separate them form the true, general or strong, AI that is lurking right around the corner. To look at the progress of VI all you need to do is look at the progress being made in autonomous driving. However that kind of AI is very task specific and,as Dr. Ben Goertzel points out, is notoriously difficult to adapt to anything except what is was originally designed to do. The chess program, for instance, is never going to play Backgammon with you. It has no ability to expand on it's own parameters or adapt what it knows about playing Chess to any other endeavor. True AI will have these abilities and will, very rapidly from a human perspective, redesign itself to solve a number of problems and limitations. Both for itself and for us. Will it be Skynet (like in the Terminator Franchise) and decide to wipe us out. No. There are several very good reasons why this is not the case but they are outside the scope of this article. What is not outside the scope of this article however is another set of observations and they are first, and again from a human perspective, if you have enough VI it has the same effect as True AI and second, it's only a mater of time before the good folks working on true AI design a VI to help them get it done sooner rather than later. Probably much sooner.

Once we have True AI (or enough VI) all bets are off. Our problems will no longer be driven by concepts such as supply and demand, but rather by the limits of our own imagination and character . . but that's another topic.

Advancing machine intelligence

Check this slide show out and really consider what some of these advances will mean.

New terms to know "Catoms", "WREL", "brain-activity monitoring technology" and "WISP".

Visions of the Future - Part 3

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away -- -
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
- Lewis Carroll

This episode explores the Quantum Revolution

A little food for thought this week

Here are some of what I think are the top science stories this week. Notice that in most of these the news is current or in the very near future. We're not talking about speculation for the next thirty years, but within the next three years.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will join scientists from SETI
The first mission for the Allen Telescope Array will be to scan several billion stars across a vast swath of our own Milky Way galaxy, said astronomer Seth Shostak, of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. That broad-brush survey will be followed in the coming years by detailed examinations of a million stars — a quantum leap in coverage of celestial real estate. In the 45 years since scientists first started looking for signals from alien worlds, only about 750 stars have gotten such close scrutiny.
"This is an exponential increase in speed," Shostak said.

Craig Venter is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.
The announcement, which is expected within weeks . . .
The Guardian can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved. Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code.


University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that's as strong as steel but lighter and transparent.
The researchers created this new composite plastic with a machine they developed that builds materials one nanoscale layer after another.

Darpa hatches plan for insect cyborgs to fly reconnaissance
Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its '"HI-MEMS" program succeeds.
Insect swarms with various sorts of different embedded MEMS sensors--video cameras, audio microphones, chemical sniffers and more--could then penetrate enemy territory in swarms to perform reconnaissance missions impossible or too dangerous for soldiers.

A principle of achieving ultrahigh light dispersion that makes use of surface plasmon polaritons on nanostructures.

Uh . . . . what?

This makes the technobable on Star Trek: The Next Generation sound reasonable by comparison.
Read all about it - if you dare.