Myers still thinks Kurzweil does not understand the brain

The blog war between PZ Myers and Ray Kurzweil continues. Myers has now retorted to Kurzweil's retort:

...you can't measure the number of transistors in an Intel CPU and then announce, "A-ha! We now understand what a small amount of information is actually required to create all those operating systems and computer games and Microsoft Word, and it is much, much smaller than everyone is assuming." Put it in those terms, and the Kurzweil fanboys would laugh at him; put it in terms of something they don't understand at all, like the development and function of the brain, and they're willing to go along with the pretense that the genome tells us that the whole organism is simpler than they thought.

I presume they understand that if you program a perfect Intel emulator, you don't suddenly get Halo: Reach for free, as an emergent property of the system. You can buy the code and add it to the system, sure, but in this case, we can't run down to GameStop and buy a DVD with the human OS in it and install it on our artificial brain. You're going to have to do the hard work of figuring out how that works and reverse engineering it, as well. And understanding how the processor works is necessary to do that, but not sufficient.

Myers concludes,

In short, here's Kurzweil's claim: the brain is simpler than we think, and thanks to the accelerating rate of technological change, we will understand it's basic principles of operation completely within a few decades. My counterargument, which he hasn't addressed at all, is that 1) his argument for that simplicity is deeply flawed and irrelevant, 2) he has made no quantifiable argument about how much we know about the brain right now, and I argue that we've only scratched the surface in the last several decades of research, 3) "exponential" is not a magic word that solves all problems (if I put a penny in the bank today, it does not mean I will have a million dollars in my retirement fund in 20 years), and 4) Kurzweil has provided no explanation for how we'll be 'reverse engineering' the human brain. He's now at least clearly stating that decoding the genome does not generate the necessary information — it's just an argument that the brain isn't as complex as we thought, which I've already said is bogus — but left dangling is the question of methodology. I suggest that we need to have a combined strategy of digging into the brain from the perspectives of physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and development, and in all of those fields I see a long hard slog ahead. I also don't see that noisemakers like Kurzweil, who know nothing of those fields, will be making any contribution at all.

Link.

Harvard scientist guilty of misconduct

The New York Times is reporting that Harvard University has found a prominent researcher, Marc Hauser, “solely responsible” for eight instances of scientific misconduct.

Dr. Hauser is a leader in the field of animal and human cognition, and in 2006 wrote a well-received book, “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.”

Harvard’s findings against him, if sustained, may cast a shadow over the broad field of scientific research that depended on the particular research technique often used in his experiments.

More.

GlaxoSmithKline insists their anti-aging pills work

Nature is reporting that pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline is striking back at those critics who are claiming that their anti-aging pills do not work. The company is hoping that their recent report published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry will quell debates over whether the drugs activate a key anti-ageing protein called SIRT1.

It's worth noting that the authors of the study mostly work for their subsidiary company, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, who are based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sirtris had been working on compounds that activate SIRT1 and their initial efforts yielded promising results, prompting London-based drug giant GSK to buy the company for US$720 million in 2008. The drugs are thought to mimic the effects of the red wine component resveratrol.

But then things changed:

Even at that time, a team led by Matt Kaeberlein, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle2 questioned whether resveratrol directly activates SIRT1, which is involved in the anti-ageing effects of dietary restriction. Their experiments showed that resveratrol activated SIRT1 only when a fluorescent molecule used to gauge its activity was present. Scientists at biotechnology company Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California came to a similar conclusion last year.

That critique resurfaced this year when scientists at Pfizer in Groton, Connecticut, raised a similar question over SIRT1-activating compounds being developed by GSK4. GSK says that these compounds are more potent than resveratrol at activating SIRT1 and therefore more useful as drugs.

"The papers did a lot of damage to a lot of people," says Ross Stein, a scientist at Sirtris and lead author on the company's new rebuttal.

More.

Organs on-demand

It won't be long before surgeons routinely install replacement body parts created in the laboratory:

Anthony Atala works in the body shop of the future. He is the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and he and his colleagues use human cells to grow muscles, blood vessels, skin and even a complete urinary bladder. Much of the work is experimental and hasn’t yet been tested in human patients, but Atala has implanted laboratory-grown bladders into more than two dozen children and young adults born with defective bladders that don’t empty properly, a condition that can cause kidney damage. The bladders were the first lab-generated human organs implanted in people. If they continue to perform well in clinical tests, the treatment may become standard not only for birth defects of the bladder but also for bladder cancer and other conditions.

Link.

Kurzweil responds to PZ Myers

Ray Kurzweil has retorted to PZ Myers's claim that he does not understand the brain:

For starters, I said that we would be able to reverse-engineer the brain sufficiently to understand its basic principles of operation within two decades, not one decade, as Myers reports.

Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain.

I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand.

Be sure to read the entire response.

Sentient Developments RSS feed

Like what you see here on Sentient Developments? Then be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed!

Because it's cool

NASA image of the Earth and Moon taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft. Distance is 114 million miles.

Science fictional stalkers, urgent transparency... & science!

David Brin is a Sentient Developments guest blogger.

=== First, items related to sci fi! ===

See a vivid and clever animated tale about superstition and its consequences. Note the copy of The Postman (in yellow) in the stack in front of the library near the beginning!

Just to show you how dangerous it is to be a World Famous author, first have another look at JK Rowling’s very best literary “stalker”... (brilliant stuff!)...

...and then (if you have a thick skin for bawdiness) gander at this video of appreciation dedicated to my pal Ray Bradbury.
And yes, that is what the typical sci fi fan is like.
Especially my fans.
Right! ;-)


=== News From the transparency front ===

1) Read this. Show it to friends. It is not about left or right... nor are the police being particularly vile. Only human. Nevertheless, this must nor be allowed to stand.

3) "Over-the-counter markets for derivatives have been a subject of blame for the global crisis. This column argues that the rising opacity and barriers to entry in these markets have been sorely overlooked leading to dark pools, flash trading, and front-running. These unfair practices can – at any time – cripple markets. They undermine the premise of free markets and should be stopped......Dark pools are a private or alternative trading system that allows participants to transact without displaying quotes publicly. Orders are anonymously matched and not reported to any entity, even the regulators (Younglai and Spicer 2009). Thus, the mainstream exchange-traded market does not have any clue about the volume of transactions happening in this parallel market or the prices at which they are being executed.

“Obviously, price discovery on the mainstream market, without dark pools information, becomes inefficient. Moreover, transactions carried out in dark pools effectively become over-the-counter in nature as the prices are not reported and financial risks not effectively managed. More critically, these risks can spread like wild fire as we saw in collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps markets."

3) Falling Whistles is an organization is committed to raising awareness to the civil war underway in the Congo. In this conflict, boys too small to carry a gun are forced to become “whistle blowers” and sent to the front lines of the war. Facing death they are sent running toward the army as the first wave of attackers – armed with only their whistle. (Shudder!)


=== More Science! ===

See the editorial introducing Scientific American’s September issue about the many varied types of “doomsday” people are bruiting about. Of course, this relates to my novel-in-progress - EXISTENCE.

Are you an electronics wiz who wants a really far-out cool project? According to a recent, important paper by Benford, Benford and Benford, the SETI Institute’s Allen Array - a lavishly funded radio telescope dedicated to sifting the cosmos for signs of intelligent life - is designed EXACTLY WRONG! What is needed instead is a vast dispersal of 5,000 less sensitive backyard receivers, linked in a network that will look at all the sky, all the time... exactly as conceived in Project Argus!

And then... hydrogen gas flowing down through Titan's atmosphere disappears at the surface, suggesting it could be being breathed by alien bugs. Also lack of acetylene on the surface, leading scientists to believe it may be being consumed by life. Scientists had expected sunlight interacting with chemicals in the atmosphere to produce acetylene that falls down to coat Titan's surface. But Cassini detected no acetylene there.

And a book that seems whimsically interesting. “In Packing for Mars, Roach tackles the strange science of space travel, and the psychology, technology, and politics that go into sending a crew into orbit. Roach is unfailingly inquisitive (Why is it impolite for astronauts to float upside down during conversations? Just how smelly does a spacecraft get after a two week mission?)”

=== ANOTHER ITEM FOR THE PREDICTIONS REGISTRY? ===

Compare this exciting scientific news story - about the careful, layer-by-layer analysis of 650 million year old fossils - with my portrayal of a very similar process, in my story "Genji" which appeared in the collaborative science fiction collection MURASAKI, way back in 1992.

"The laser played across the cliff face in double waves. First a gentle scan lit every millimeter of the sheer sedimentary surface, while widely spaced recording devices read its reflections, noting every microscopic contour and color variation. Then, when that first scan was finished, the machine sent forth a much more powerful second beam, which seared away a thin layer wherever it touched. Monitors now recorded glowing spectra from these vapors, taking down elemental compositions in minute detail.

"... What grew in the computer display was a slice by thin slice representation of the cliff. Each horizontal lamina layer had been laid down along this ancient coast long ago, when the vagaries of this slowly shifting archipelago pushed lapping tidal waters over the place where he now stood. Amid the slowly growing image in his holo screen lay speckles of bright color where the semi intelligent device discovered the outlines of fossils... the remains of dead Genjian creatures which had settled into the mud long ago, only to have their hard tissues replaced gradually by a process of mineralization and preservation quite similar to what occurred on Earth."

My friend, the late American space pioneer, Dr Robert L Forward, proposed that the orbit of a geostationary satellite could be pushed above -- or below -- the usual geostationary ring around the Earth, which follows the line of the equator, by using a large solar sail propelled by the pressure of sunlight. However, critics later claimed that such 'displaced orbits' were impossible due to the unusual dynamics of the problem. Now his idea has been proved.

...and finally...


=== Okay I was wrong ===

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was forced to retire in July after an embarrassing Rolling Stone article quoted him and his staff making disparaging remarks about top White House Officials , is taking a job at Yale. All right then, his lapse in judgement wasn’t deliberate - to win a retirement gig on Fox. Instead, maybe it was simply human. Ah well. At least we do not make such men throw themselves on their swords. Benefit of the doubt. It seems he was and is ... a useful person.

-------

PS... just returned (exhausted) from shepherding three teens through Paris and ... Rome in August. No wonder those guys ventured forth to conquer Gaul! (See details on my facebook page!)

Reality check: Your odds of dying from...

Greely on enhancing brains: What are we afraid of?

Back in 2008, Henry T. Greely, a professor at Stanford Law School, contributed to a Nature commentary (PDF) in which he concluded that "safe and effective cognitive enhancers will benefit both the individual and society.” These days Greely is hoping we can take it a step further and hopes that, instead of banning cognitive enhancements, we start to determine the rules for their use. Addressing his critics, Greely writes,

There are at least three unsound reasons for concern: cheating, solidarity, and naturalness.

Many people find the assertion that enhancement is cheating to be convincing. Sometimes it is: If rules or laws ban an enhancement, then using it is cheating. But that does not help in situations where there are no rules or the rules are still being determined. The problem with viewing enhancements as cheating is that enhancements, broadly defined, are ubiquitous. If taking a cognitive-enhancement drug before a college entrance exam is cheating, what about taking a prep course? Using a computer program for test preparation? Reading a book about taking the test? Drinking a cup of coffee the morning of the test? Getting a good night’s sleep before the test? To say that direct brain enhancement is inherently cheating is to require a standard of what the “right” competition is. What would be the generally accepted standard in our complex and only somewhat meritocratic society?

The idea of enhancement as cheating is also related to the idea that enhancement replaces effort. Yet the plausible cognitive enhancements would not eliminate the need to study; they would just make studying more effective. In any event, we do not reward effort, we reward success. People with naturally good memories have advantages over others in organic chemistry exams, but they did not work for that good memory.

Some argue that enhancement is unnatural and threatens to take us beyond our humanity. This argument, too, suffers from a major problem. All of our civilization is unnatural. A fair speaker could not fly across a continent, take a taxi to an air-conditioned auditorium, and give a microphone-assisted PowerPoint presentation decrying enhancement as unnatural without either a sense of humor or a good argument for why these enhancements are different. Because they change our physical bodies? So do medicine, good food, clothing, and a hundred other unnatural changes. Because they change our brains? So does education. What argument justifies drawing the line here and not there? A strong naturalness argument against direct brain enhancements, in particular, has not been—and I think cannot be—made. Humans have constantly been changing our world and ourselves, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. A golden age of unenhanced naturalness is a myth, not an argument.

Link.

Those with 'fused' identities more willing to die for their social group

Psychologist William B. Swann, Jr., of the University of Texas has come up with the idea of "fused identities" to describe people who are exceptionally bound to their social group—so much so that they're willing to kill themselves to preserve it.

Those people who are "fused" with a group—a bond even stronger than group identification—will take extreme actions to protect other group members, but not outsiders. It is thought that this intense bond to a group may help explain the actions of suicide bombers.

Swann believes that there is something particularly unique about terrorists and other extremists that goes beyond simple identification. He calls this phenomenon identity fusion and argues that it has two characteristics that make it different from plain old group identity: (1) a sense that you and the group have a shared core essence, and (2) a feeling of reciprocal strength.

"You give the group strength and the group gets strength from you," says Swann. People who are fused with a group, whether it's a country or a military unit, often say they would be willing to fight and die for the group.

To test how fused people behave, Swann and his colleagues asked Spanish volunteers how they saw themselves in relation to Spain. This was done using a pictorial scale in which the person and "Spain" were overlapping circles; those who said their circle was completely inside Spain's were considered fused. Each participant answered some variation on the classic trolley problem (in which a runaway trolley is about to kill some people).

In one variation, the dilemma was whether the participant would jump on the tracks and die to save five Spaniards. People whose identities were fused with Spain were more likely to sacrifice themselves, while others would let their fellow Spaniards die. Additional experiments found that fused people would also sacrifice themselves for a group of Europeans—a group that includes Spaniards—and that they would be more likely to do so for Europeans than for Americans.

Perhaps the most striking finding was in the last experiment. In that scenario, participants imagined that it was the day of the Madrid bombings, and someone else was about to jump on the train tracks to kill both himself and the bombers. Fused respondents were more likely to say they would push the would-be martyr out of the way so that they could die to save others. "It's amazing to me that these guys would endorse that kind of behavior," says Swann. "It's just a little hard, as outsiders, to wrap our heads around the idea that people will sacrifice themselves to produce an outcome that would occur even if they did nothing."

This study may help explain why suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves: Fused individuals see their own essence and strength as coupled to the group they belong to. The research also has other applications, says Swann. In the military, for example, having service members fused to their group is important, so they'll act as a unit. "But when they come back, you want them to de-fuse with their group and re-fuse with their family," Swann says—an adjustment that is difficult for many people.

Scientists one step closer to mimicking caloric restriction with anti-aging drugs

A team of University of Michigan scientists have discovered how a gene's action may help explain why restricting diet lengthens life in animals. The results offer promising early evidence that scientists may succeed at finding targets for drugs that someday could allow people to live longer, healthier lives.

Specifically, they found that suppressing a newly discovered gene lengthens the lifespan of roundworms. We've long known that significantly restricting food intake makes animals live longer, but the goal is to find less drastic ways to achieve the same effect in humans someday.

To find possible avenues for future anti-aging drugs, many scientists are focusing on signaling pathways in cells that sense nutrients. The one examined by the Michigan team, the target of rapamycin pathway or TOR pathway, is so named because its activity can be influenced by the drug rapamycin. Recent results from a large federal study being conducted at U-M and elsewhere have shown that in mice, rapamycin is effective at mimicking the anti-aging effects of dietary restriction.

Research in the last 25 years has shown that animals, including mammals, live longer and have lower levels of certain measures of age-related decline when scientists have restricted their food intake. It's highly suspected that the same effect hold trues for humans, hence the caloric restriction life extension movement.

When calories or certain nutrients are restricted, scientists detect less oxidative damage in animal cells and a slower decline in DNA repair, a decline that normally occurs with age. It's thought that limiting oxidative damage and slowing the decline in DNA repair could help postpone or avoid many age-related diseases.

That said, scientists know relatively little about why reducing food intake causes these effects. In the last 10 years, they have made progress in identifying genes and associated proteins that are suppressed when diet is restricted. By learning more about the cell processes involved, they may be able to discover targets for future drugs that could delay aging without the need to restrict food intake.

Drugs tailored to block specific genes or proteins involved in nutrient-sensing pathways would have much more appeal than reducing what one eats. To achieve anti-aging benefits, it's thought that people would have to restrict food intake by 30 to 40 percent, a grim prospect. In addition, drugs might be designed to avoid other disadvantages of this level of dietary restriction, which include reduced fertility.

C. elegans is a tiny roundworm, a nematode whose two-week lifespan is a great advantage for scientists studying aging. The 1-millimeter-long transparent worms have other advantages, too. C. elegans exhibits many age-associated changes observed in higher organisms. "Many genes identified in C. elegans to control the speed of aging turned out to be evolutionarily conserved, meaning that you can find them in other animals, too. And many are very similar to those found in humans," Ao-Lin Allen Hsu says, lead researcher of the Michigan team.

Hsu and his team created different mutant strains of roundworms, some with drr-2 genes silenced and others in which the gene was over-expressed. They wanted to learn whether inactivating drr-2 is essential for TOR to influence longevity, and found that it was. Other newly discovered genes may affect TOR signaling as well. But Hsu's team has found a promising lead for anti-aging drugs of the future: They were able to show that silencing drr-2's action alone was sufficient to make worms live longer than wild-type C. elegans used as controls.

"It is known that reduction of TOR signaling in response to a change in the environment or genetic manipulation triggers a cascade of cellular signals that alter cell growth, metabolism, and protein synthesis, and decrease the pace of aging," says Hsu. "Our recent studies have shown that drr-2 might play a pivotal role in the TOR signaling network to control protein synthesis as well as longevity."

IBM's World Factbook Interactive Dashboard

Data visualization is becoming increasingly important, so I'm always interested in seeing the various ways in which massive amounts of information can be portrayed in a human-comprehensible style. To that end, IBM's ILOG Elixir development team is working on a powerful and elegant interactive dashboard:


IBM's team is showing off the data rendering capabilities of Adobe Flex through an online demonstration of their World Factbook Dashboard. It's a heavily stylized application that contains various gauges, 3D column and pie charts, a radar chart, a treemap and a world map view, which are all coordinated and synced through some very smooth animated effects. The different views also allow for the dynamic, user-driven scaling of the color legend, while countries can be compared by those in their immediate neighborhood.




More here and here.

On Skeptically Speaking Radio this coming Friday August 20

In light of the recently concluded Singularity Summit, I'll be debating blogger Greg Fish on Skeptically Speaking Radio this coming August 20. We'll be discussing the Singularity and various pathways towards powerful AI.

This will mark my second appearance on Skeptically Speaking. My first debate with Greg Fish can be found here.

Myers: Kurzweil is a "pseudo-scientific dingbat" who "does not understand" the brain

Biologist and skeptic PZ Myers has ripped into Ray Kurzweil for his recent claim that the human brain will be completely modeled by 2020 (Note: Not that it's particularly important, but Kurzweil did say it'll take two decades at the recent Singularity Summit, not one). In a rather sweeping and insulting article titled, "Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain," Myers takes the position that the genome cannot possibly serve as an effective blueprint in our efforts to reverse engineer the human brain.

In regards to he claim that the design of the brain is in the genome, he writes,

Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It's [sic] design is not encoded in the genome: what's in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn't even aware of the magnitude of that problem.

We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven't even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil's clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!

Myers continues:

To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it's the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn't even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.

Okay, while I agree that Kurzweil's timeline is ridiculously optimistic (I'm thinking we'll achieve a modeled human brain sometime between 2075 and 2100), Myers's claim that Kurzweil "knows nothing" about the brain is as incorrect as it is disingenuous. Say what you will about Kurzweil, but the man does his homework. While I wouldn't make the claim that he does seminal work in the neurosciences, I will say that his efforts at describing the brain along computationally functionalist terms is important. The way he has described the brain's redundancy and massively repeating arrays is as fascinating as it is revealing.

Moreover, Myers's claim that the human genome cannot inform our efforts at reverse engineering the brain is equally unfair and ridiculous. While I agree that the genome is not the brain, it undeniably contains the information required to construct a brain from scratch. This is irrefutable and Myers can stamp his feet in protest all he wants. We may be unable to properly read this data as yet, or even execute the exact programming required to set the process in motion, but that doesn't mean the problem is intractable. It's still early days. In addition, we have an existing model, the brain, to constantly juxtapose against the data embedded in our DNA (e.g. cognitive mapping).

Again, it just seems excruciatingly intuitive and obvious to think that our best efforts at emulating an entire brain will be informed to a considerable extent by pre-existing data, namely our own DNA and its millions upon millions of years of evolutionary success.

Oh, and Myers: Let's lose the ad hominem.

Nanoscale DNA sequencing to spur revolution in personal health care

Researchers at the University of Washington have devised a method that works at a very small scale to sequence DNA quickly and relatively inexpensively. The process could eventually open the door for more effective individualized medicine. It's hoped that the method will, among other things, provide blueprints of genetic predispositions for specific conditions and diseases such as cancer, diabetes or addiction.

"The hope is that in 10 years people will have all their DNA sequenced, and this will lead to personalized, predictive medicine," said Jens Gundlach, a UW physics professor and lead author of a paper describing the breakthrough.

The technique creates a DNA reader that combines biology and nanotechnology using a nanopore taken from Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A. The nanopore has an opening 1 billionth of a meter in size, just large enough to measure a single strand of DNA as it passes through.

The research team placed the pore in a membrane surrounded by potassium-chloride solution and a small voltage was applied to create an ion current flowing through the nanopore. The current's electrical signature changed depending on the nucleotides traveling through the nanopore. Each of the nucleotides that are the essence of DNA (namely cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine) produced a distinctive signature.

The delay is measured in thousandths of a second, which is long enough to read the electrical signals from the target nucleotides. "We can practically read the DNA sequence from an oscilloscope trace," said Gundlach.

The work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and its National Human Genome Research Institute as part of a program to create technology to sequence a human genome for $1,000 or less. That program began in 2004, when it cost on the order of $10 million to sequence a human-sized genome. The new research is a major step toward achieving DNA sequencing at a cost of $1,000 or less.

Ultimately, it is hoped that these experiments will outline a novel and fundamentally very simple sequencing technology that can now be expanded into a mechanized process.

NYT: The first church of robotics

Computer scientist and technology critic Jaron Lanier offers his two cents on the silicon valley mindset in his op-ed, "The first church of robotics." Excerpt:

The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.

Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.

It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.

What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity — whether it’s the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science or stem-cell research.

If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?

Link.

Scientists successfully use human stem cells to treat Parkinson's in rodents

Researchers have successfully used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to treat rodents afflicted with Parkinson's Disease (PD). The research, conducted at the Buck Institute for Age Research, validates a scalable protocol that the same group had previously developed. It may eventually be used to manufacture the type of neurons needed to treat the disease and paves the way for the use of iPSC's in various biomedical applications.

Researchers in the lab used human iPSCs that were derived from skin and blood cells and coaxed them to become dopamine-producing neurons. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the mid-brain that facilitates many critical functions, including motor skills. Patients with PD lack sufficient dopamine; the disease is a progressive, incurable neurodegenerative disorder that affects 1.5 million Americans and results in tremor, slowness of movement and rigidity.

"The studies are very encouraging for potential cell therapies for Parkinson's disease," said Alan Trounson, Ph.D., the President of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "The researchers showed they could produce quantities of dopaminergic neurons necessary to improve the behavior of a rodent model of PD. We look forward to further work that could bring closer a new treatment for such a debilitating disease."

Source.

Dilbert and the Turing test

It's funny cuz it's true; I think we all know people who would "fail" the Turing test ;-)

Click image to enlarge.

Bring on the 'moral' Turing test

Tony Beavers brings this fascinating paper to our attention, "Moral Machines and the Threat of Ethical Nihilism." Excerpt from the paper:

In 2000, Allen, Varner and Zinser addressed the possibility of a Moral Turing Test (MTT) to judge the success of an automated moral agent (AMA), a theme that is repeated in Wallach and Allen (2009). While the authors are careful to note that a language-only test based on moral justifications, or reasons, would be inadequate, they consider a test based on moral behavior. “One way to shift the focus from reasons to actions,” they write, “might be to restrict the information available to the human judge in some way. Suppose the human judge in the MTT is provided with descriptions of actual, morally significant actions of a human and an AMA, purged of all references that would identify the agents. If the judge correctly identifies the machine at a level above chance, then the machine has failed the test” (206). While they are careful to note that indistinguishability between human and automated agents might set the bar for passing the test too low, such a test by its very nature decides the morality of an agent on the basis of appearances. Since there seems to be little else we could use to determine the success of an AMA, we may rightfully ask whether, analogous to the term "thinking" in other contexts, the term "moral" is headed for redescription here. Indeed, Wallach and Allen’s survey of the problem space of machine ethics forces the question of whether in fifty years (or less) one will be able to speak of a machine as being moral without expecting to be contradicted. Supposing the answer were yes, why might this invite concern? What is at stake? How might such a redescription of the term "moral" come about?

Link.