Cascio chimes in on Fermi

IEET colleague Jamais Cascio has responded to Nick Bostrom's suggestion that the detection of extraterrestrial life would be bad news.

Cascio is unconvinced that the parameters of Bostrom's argument are entirely correct, including the assumption that super-advanced civs take up interstellar colonization as a hobby.

Specifically, he argues that technologically advanced ETI's must be post-Singularity civs, and by definition, outside the bounds of current trajectorial models. As Cascio notes, "The demands and concerns and requirements of a post-Singularity civilization wouldn't be based on a pre-Singularity pattern."

Consequently, Cascio makes the claim that galactic empires are likely not on the post-Singularity to-do list. "To be clear, this isn't an argument that these interstellar-capable civs just sit at home. They could and would likely spread, and certainly explore," he writes, "But the notion that they'd hop from solar system to solar system planting their colonies, strikes me as terribly unimaginative, and definitely a pre-Singularity perspective."

I'm not entirely on board with Cascio here, but I will say that he is absolutely correct when he suggests that speculations about colonization-capable civs must presuppose their condition as being post-Singularity.

And I'll further this by noting that we should adopt a digital perspective. As NASA's Steven J. Dick has noted, we should be looking for post-biological brains.

Consequently, when we try to figure out what futuristic civilizations might look like, we should consider:

1. the demands imposed on a civ that's completely reliant on megascale computing
2. the potential mindspace of a post-Singularity superintelligence, its interpretation of utility, and the manner in which it achieves its goals

For the first point, we're talking about a postbiological modality that would likely require a hideous amount of computational power.

As for the second point, good luck with that one.

But where Cascio and I diverge is in how he deals with the non-exclusivity problem -- i.e. finding a solution to the FP that applies to ALL advanced civs.

Cascio argues that Galactic colonization is "unimaginative" and a "pre-Singularity" perspective.

Sure, this may be true. And perhaps 99.9% of all advanced civs would agree with him.

But it's the 0.01% that I'm concerned about.

It's not impossible or ridiculous to imagine at least one non-conformist civilization taking it upon itself to expand its presence across the Galaxy.

Moreover, the colonization process for a post-Singularity intelligence would be a rather pedestrian exercise -- one that doesn't really require much of a commitment. Interstellar colonization would be a largely automated process that exploits the happy consequence of exponential growth.

To be fair, Cascio does suggest that there may be an a universal upper bound to growth. Cascio notes, "Interstellar-capable civilizations that somehow remain wedded to colonization would inevitably fall into internal conflict because of speed-of-light communication/travel lag and divergent evolution (social or biological)."

I think the disconnect here is the notion that galactic colonization necessarily implies the expansion and interconnectedness of communication, economic and political networks. I'm not so convinced. Nodes spawned by Von Neumann probes could be stand-alone and completely segregated from its parent system. One could imagine a Von Neumann wave expanding outward, uplifting all life and matter in its path and leaving computronium in its wake; the probes would not be equipped with rear-view mirrors.

Cascio also presents another possible reconciliation to the Fermi Paradox -- the notion that we are not yet capable of detecting the activities of advanced civs. Specifically, he suggests that ETIs may use alternative communication schemes. Again, as Cascio argues, because we're talking about post-Singularity life, we simply don't know what we're supposed to be looking for.

Unfortunately, this doesn't really solve the Paradox. We are still still stuck with the colonization problem.

That's the crux of the the Fermi Paradox why it remains a non-trivial conundrum. It's also why the FP was given new life in the 1970s by Michael Hart, John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, and why in recent times it has become more perplexing than ever.

The Fermi Paradox is alive and well.

The Singularity is not what you think

People often ask me for my definition of the technological Singularity.

More specifically, they want me to offer some predictions as to what it will actually look like and what it might mean to them and the human species.

More often than not they don't like my answer, and it's probably because I re-frame the discussion and take the conversation elsewhere.

What people are really asking me to do is predict the outcome of the Singularity. And because I don't, they get frustrated with me.

But that's the problem. That's the whole point of this 'thing' we call the Singularity.

As has been noted elsewhere, virtually everyone has their own definition of the Singularity and it's become a very polluted term, one that's been stripped of all meaning.

So, before I tell you my own 'definition' of the Singularity, let me first tell you what it's not.

It's not any particular outcome or prognostication.

It's not any kind of definable event or transformational process.

Nor is it a term that can be used to describe a futuristic state of existence or the nature of advanced artificial intelligence.

But it's often used to describe these very things -- as if the term can be used as a synonym for what are essentially predictions. When people talk about the Singularity they can't help but inject their own anticipated outcome -- be it positive or negative.

I can be guilty of this at times. But so I don't get myself into too much futurological trouble I tend to refer to things as being in a state of post-Singularity. That's my clever way of avoiding any in-depth discussion as to how we'll actually get there.

Alright, so what's the technological Singularity?

Simply put, it's an unanswered question.

Vernor Vinge used the term Singularity for a very good reason. It's an event horizon in the truest sense.

But instead of a cosmological event horizon caused by a black hole's gravitational pull, it's a social event horizon caused by our inability to extrapolate the trajectory of human civilization beyond a certain point of technological sophistication.

The Singularity, therefore, describes a futurological problem -- a blind-spot in our predictive thinking.

That's it. There's no more to it than that.

Anything beyond this strict and limited definition is a discussion of something else -- an attempt to solve the conundrum and make predictions about 1) the actual characteristics and manifestation of the Singularity and 2) its aftermath.

So, if I say that the Singularity will involve a hard takeoff of SAI, I'm actually presenting a hypothesis that attempts to retire the term 'Singularity' and see it replaced by the term, uh, SAI hard takeoff event (we'll clearly have to come up with something better).

Or, if I say it will be a decades long process that sees humanity transition into a postbiological condition, I am likewise trying to put the term to rest.

Why does our predictive modeling break down?

Two reasons: 1) accelerating change and 2) the theoretic potential for the rise of recursively self-modifying artificial superintelligence.

Essentially, because disruptive change will be coming so fast and furiously, humanity's future remains largely unpredicted; there are too many variables and wildcards. And the rise of SAI, given its potential to be thousands upon thousands of times more powerful than the human mind, is simply beyond our prognosticative sensibilities.

Sure, we can make wild-ass guesses. And maybe one or two of them may actually turn out to be correct. But we won't know for sure until we get there.

Or at least until we get really close.

Consequently, the Singularity is a relativistic term.

People of the future won't use the word. That's a term reserved for us in our ignorance.

But as we get closer to the Singularity we will in all likelihood gain an increased appreciation of what will happen at the point when machine intelligence exceeds the capacity of humans.

And keeps on going.

At that point, once the fog that is the Singularity begins to lift, we will cease to call it the Singularity and replace it with a more descriptive term.

So, as we journey forward, what was once concealed over the horizon will finally be revealed.

In the meantime, just remember to frame the Singularity as a social event horizon, particularly as it pertains to accelerating change and the seemingly imminent rise of SAI.

Just a little more to the right

The epic journey of the KATRIN main spectrometer.

[via Neatorama]

Links for 2008-05-12

• That Must Be Bob. I Hear His New Hip Squeaking. (New York Times)
  The first time John L. Johnson's artificial hip squeaked, he was bending down to pick up a pine cone in his yard in Thomasville, Ga. Mr. Johnson looked up, expecting to find an animal nearby.
• Our surveillance society goes online (The Guardian)
  The potential for computers to read and understand data places our privacy under threat.
• Five science fiction movies that get the science right (New Scientist)
  So, to give credit where it's due, we have picked out five more sci-fi films that go against the grain, and contain some accurate, plausible science. They may not be completely realistic, but they get it right when it matters most.
• The World's Spookiest Weapons (Popular Science)
  Cyborg animals, psychotropics and flying lasers are just some of the terrifying weapons government labs have cooked up over the years.
• Learning to Breathe Mars Air (Video) (Universe Today)
  Talk about dedication! Volunteers in Russia are testing the ability of humans to breathe argon-enriched air, as part of a research program that simulates a manned trip to Mars.
• Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool (PhysOrg)
  Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.
• Put a Tyrant in Your Tank (Mother Jones)
  You thought ExxonMobil was bad? Meet the new kings of crude.
• Dr. Pinker Lays the Smackdown on Leon Kass (Accelerating Future)
  In The Stupidity of Dignity, published a couple weeks ago at The New Republic, Dr. Pinker sees right through Kass' hyper-theological, far-right, intolerant, paternalistic bioethics.

Syndication strangeness

I recently had 50% of my RSS subscribers suddenly disappear (I use FeedBurner). If for some reason you were knocked off my syndication list, please re-subscribe. And be sure to subscribe to the Sentient Developments podcast.

Links for 2008-05-11

• Is in vitro meat the future? (Times Online)
  Chicken, beef and pork that has never been a living animal could be better for people and the planet. But will it catch on?
• A Real Nuclear Option for the Nominees (Slate)
  Averting "inadvertent" war in two easy steps.
• VIDEO: Chimp Memory Beats Humans' (Nat'l Geographic)
  Watch young chimpanzees beat Japanese college students in a short-term-memory test by a wide margin—raising questions about primate intelligence and evolution.
• You say in Vitro meat, yuck. But eat deep fried meat slurry, corn and chemicals. Called chicken nuggets (Next Big Future)
  Many people have an initial reaction that invitro meat would be yucky and they do not want it. However, people already eat meat slurry in fairly large quantities.
• Boy seized by child welfare to make sure he gets chemotherapy (Globe & Mail)
  Child welfare officials have taken temporary custody of an 11-year-old Ontario boy to ensure he undergoes chemotherapy after his father decided to take him off treatment for his aggressive form of leukemia.
• Trajectories - The Rise of Rockets in the Post-Space-Age Age (NYT)
  TO JUDGE from the news out of NASA these days, you might think we are witnessing the last gasps of the space age.
• David Deutsch Speaks With Aubrey De Grey About Sens (Thoughtware.TV )
  Renowned Quantum Physicist, and father of the Quantum Computer, David Deutsch speaks with Aubrey de Grey about the scientific details, and feasibility of life extension technology SENS.

One year ago on SentDev: When hypergiants go hypernova

It was about a year ago around this time that scientists observed a star that went nova 238 million years ago. It turned out to be a hypernova that made a big badda boom.
__________________

Scientists predicted that something like this could happen, and now they have actually observed it: a hypergiant star went nova.

About 238 million years ago a star in galaxy NGC 1260 ended its life. To say that it was a powerful explosion would be a gross understatement; the amount of explosive energy expelled by supernova SN 2006gy defies human comprehension.

Prior to its dramatic death, the hypergiant star, which was 150 times larger than our own, suffered a sudden and violent collapse. Extremely high levels of gamma radiation from the star's core caused its energy to transform to matter, and the drop in energy in turn caused the star to collapse. This resulted in a dramatic increase in the thermonuclear reactions that was burning within it. All this added energy overpowered the gravitational attraction causing the star to explode.

And explode it did.

Scientists claim that the supernova was over 150 times more powerful than any other observed to date. Physical models suggested that such a supernova was theoretically possible, but astronomers believed that such events were limited to the early Universe when stars tended to be hypergiant.

A hypernova like SN 2006gy can instantly expel about 10X46 joules. This is more energy than our sun produces over a period of 10 billion years.

According to the Astroprof blog,

At discovery, it was already as bright as a Type Ia supernova at its peak. But, instead of getting dimmer, SN 2006gy continued to get brighter for several weeks. The peak brightness seldom comes much more than a week after the explosion. Theoretical models suggest that SN 2006gy gets its light from both the expanding cloud of gas and a shock front as the cloud of gas expands into very dense gasses surrounding the progenitor star. But, the expanding gas cloud is so bright that it requires substantially more radioactive decay to heat it that would be present in almost any other supernova. The best way to get that much radioactive material, according to the model that the theorists have come up with, is for basically the whole core to be thrown out into the supernova, leaving little or nothing behind to form a neutron star or black hole. So much material is thrown out, that the supernova continues to be heated long after the explosion itself. In fact, even months later, SN 2006gy has faded in brightness only to as bright as the peak brightness of a Type Ia supernova!

In fact, astronomers were able to observe the hypernova's peak brightness for an astounding 70 days.

Supernovas can wreak tremendous havoc in its local area, effectively sterilizing the region. These explosions produce highly collimated beams of hard gamma rays that extend outward from the exploding star. Any unfortunate life-bearing planet that should come into contact with those beams would suffer a mass extinction (if not total extinction depending on its proximity to the supernova). Gamma rays would eat up the ozone layer and indirectly cause the onset of an ice age due to the prevalence of NO2 molecules.

Supernovas can shoot out directed beams of gamma rays to a distance of 100 light years, while hypernovas and gamma ray bursts can impact areas as far as 500 light years away.

Thankfully, hypergiant Eta Carinae, which is on the verge of going nova, is well over 7,500 light years away from Earth. We'll be safe when it goes off, but you'll be able to read by its light at night-time.

Is perfect memory a blessing or curse?

This book looks interesting: The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science--A Memoir.

The book's author, Jill Price, has a condition called "hyperthymestic syndrome" -- the continuous, automatic and perfect recollection of the minutiae of every day life. Price claims to be able to remember virtually every detail of her life since the age of 14.

It's apparently the first known diagnosis of this condition (although I once read an account of a Russian woman with perfect memory who had trouble distinguishing present from past -- not sure if this story is true or not, but it brings up an interesting concern).

Transhumanists who are envious of such an ability (myself included) should be aware that there may be trade-offs. According to the book description:

As we learn of Jill's struggles first to realize how unusual her memory is and then to contend, as she grows up, with the unique challenges of not being able to forget -- remembering both the good times and the bad, the joyous and the devastating, in such vivid and insistent detail -- the way her memory works is contrasted to a wealth of discoveries about the workings of normal human memory and normal human forgetting. Intriguing light is shed on the vital role of what's called "motivated forgetting"; as well as theories about childhood amnesia, the loss of memory for the first two to three years of our lives; the emotional content of memories; and the way in which autobiographical memories are normally crafted into an ever-evolving and empowering life story.

Indeed, imagine reliving every argument you ever had with a partner, or all the super-embarrassing moments of your life. And imagine never being able to 'leave' your past life stages such as your teenage years. Would you be able to truly mature and move on? "It is hard to grow up," Price says, "when you are always walking beside yourself."

So, would we want to be able to relive all memories in exquisite detail?

Given the choice I would still say yes.

I find the limitations of human memory infuriating. Not having control over which memories are stored and how they are recalled is an upsetting cognitive limitation. It's as if our subconscious mind is writing our own personal history in spite of us.

Our memories often present a narrative of events that may not be objectively accurate; most of our memories are lost, and those that are retained tend to have the subjective taint of some kind of emotional association (mostly negative). In other words, we can't have complete confidence in how we interpret our memories.

As for the emotional baggage, my feeling is that this concern is overstated. We involuntarily choose to remember the negative over the positive anyway, so I'm not convinced that a whole lot would change. Personally, I'd love to be able to recall some of the more thrilling and meaningful moments of my life with greater clarity.

And the point about not being able to leave our 'past selves' behind, again I have a feeling this is exaggerated. For me, maturation and personal development comes with the accumulation of experiences, not from any sense of distance from our previous selves.

So count me in for when perfect memory finally becomes medically possible.

Links for 2008-05-10

• Where Is My Uterine Replicator (AKA Artificial Womb)? (io9)
  Given the risk - and many months of what can charitably be termed "inconvenience" - what are the alternatives to signing up for nine months of incubator duty? Let's find out.
• Gold Farmers (WorldChanging)
  Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games.
• Iceberg dead ahead! (Globe & Mail)
  Canadian and U.S. spotters are being kept busy this year by hundreds of the frozen chunks in Atlantic shipping lanes.
• Hunger is the best spice (Practical Ethics)
  Ghrelin is a hormone produced in the stomach that appears to stimulate appetite. Chefs want to start using it as a food ingredient.
  
• The Naked Generation: Twitter, Facebook and cultural reaction to transparency (BlogSchmog)
  We write about everything. We capture it in photos and on video, and we share the links with online acquaintances known only by their login handle. It is too early in the social networking phenomenon to declare whether this practice is beneficial or not.

Upgrades to the Toronto Transhumanist website

I've made substantial changes to the Toronto Transhumanist Association website. Contact me if you'd like to learn more about the TTA.

Links for 2008-05-08

• Expelled Beats Sicko (Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias)
  Metacritic (a review aggregator) gives Michael Moore's latest movie Sicko a 74 out of 100, while the new Expelled gets only a 20. Expelled, however, is a better movie.
• The New Paternalism (ChronicleReview)
  An economist and a legal scholar argue that policy makers should nudge people into making good decisions
• Who should MDs let die in a pandemic? Report offers answers (Boston.com)
  Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won't get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.
• Human memory: memory chip could mean we never forget (Telegraph)
  Human memory could work more like Google one day, says Gary Marcus.
• Gotcha? Anglers rejoice as GM trout prove easier to catch (Times Online)
  Now there'll be no excuse for the one that got away. Britain's rivers and lakes are to be restocked with trout carrying genetic modifications that make them easier to catch.

My other blog

I've resurrected my other blog, Moment Slice.

It's where I post anything that doesn't really belong on Sentient Developments -- things like my photos and videos (especially from concerts I've gone to), music and film reviews, and so on. Think of it as my personal scrapbook.

If you're interested, you can subscribe to the feed.

Results of the male pill poll

Here are the results to the question "Are you in favor of a male birth-control pill?" (based on 98 responses):

Yes, it will be a big step forward in male reproductive control: 46%

Yes, we are currently in need of an alternative: 42%

Yes, I can't wait to start using it: 28%

Yes, it will prove important for men's rights: 28%

No, I have no need for it: 5%

No, I am opposed to all forms of birth-control: 4%

No, only women should take birth-control pills: 2%

No, men have no accountability when it comes to reproduction: 1%

No surprises here; I like to think that my readers are an enlightened bunch.

Links for 2008-05-07

• Not Black and White (William Saletan - Slate Magazine)
  Rethinking race and genes.
• The Vision for Space Exploration and the retirement of the Baby Boomers (part 2) (The Space Review)
  Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?
• Open the Future: Pondering Fermi
  Cascio's third option.
• Who's your daddy? (globeandmail.com)
  When your son is so positive, so even-tempered, so handsome - so unlike you - there is only one thing to do, David Eddie writes: Grab a home paternity kit.
• Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn't Better (New York Times)
  "If it's so great to be smart," Dr. Kawecki asks, "why have most animals remained dumb?"