Phil Plait: How to defend Earth from asteroids

What's six miles wide and can end civilization in an instant? An asteroid - and there are lots of them out there. With humor and great visuals, Phil Plait enthralls the TEDxBoulder audience with all the ways asteroids can kill, and what we must do to avoid them.

I love the approach Plait recommends; it's like jiu-jitsu meets astro-engineering.

Sentient Developments Podcast for the week of November 21, 2011

The Sentient Developments Podcast for the week of November 21, 2011 has been posted.

Topics discussed in this week's episode include the benefits of creatine, Jared Diamond's 1987 article on how agriculture was the "worst mistake in the history of the human race", the current state of lab grown meats, computational pathology, a review of the documentary "How to Live Forever", and a word (or two) on the pernicious de-radicalization of the radical future.

Podcast RSS feed. Subscribe via iTunes.

Tracks used in this episode:

• Oneohtrix Point Never: "Replica"
• The Advisory Circle: "Now Ends the Beginning"
• Russian Circles: "309"
• Hooray For Earth: "Pulling Back"

Creatine for mind, body, and longer life

Creatine molecule

Creatine is quickly becoming one of my favorite supplements, and not just because of the way it helps me in the gym. It's been shown that creatine can also be used as a nootropic and as a way to stave off potential neurodegeneration. Because earlier reports of damage to the kidneys and liver by creatine supplementation have now been scientifically refuted, creatine is becoming increasingly accepted as a powerful and multi-faceted daily supplement.

So what is it? Creatine a nitrogenous organic acid that occurs naturally in vertebrates and helps to supply energy to all cells in the body—primarily muscle. It's also been shown to assist in the growth of muscle fibres. Creatine achieves this by increasing the formation of Adenosine triphosphate (ATP). It is an osmotically active substance, so it pulls water into muscle cells. Creatine is naturally produced in the human body from amino acids primarily in the kidney and liver and is transported in the blood for use by muscles.

Back in the early 1990s it became common for bodybuilders, wrestlers, sprinters and other athletes to take creatine as word got out that it contributed to increased muscle mass and energy. Athletes began to consume two to three times the amount that could be obtained from a high protein diet. Creatine, which is typically bought in pills or flavored powders and mixed with liquid, increases the body's ability to produce energy rapidly. With more energy, athletes can train harder and more often, producing better results.

In fact, research shows that creatine is most effective in high-intensity training and explosive activities. This includes weight training and sports that require short bursts of effort, such as sprinting, football, and baseball. As a CrossFitter and an occasional user of creatine, I can certainly vouch for these effects. I believe that creatine is responsible for adding as much as five to twenty pounds to my lifts (depending on the kind of lift) along with an added boost of muscular endurance—two very desirable qualities for CrossFit athletes.

Recently I have switched from being an occasional user of creatine (3000 mg per day, cycling monthly) to a daily low dosage user (750 to 1500 mg per day every day) while on a high protein diet. I've done this for cost reasons while still hoping to take advantage of its benefits, which aren't just limited to the physical realm.

Indeed, creatine has been shown to have a significant impact on brain health. It's been shown to boost brain performance, including positive impacts on working intelligence and memory—both of which require improved cognitive processing speed. Back in 2003, a study showed that people who took creatine for six weeks scored better on tests measuring intelligence and memory than those who did not take it. And interestingly, some of the most significant cognitive benefits are experienced by vegetarians and vegans, probably on account of protein deficiencies (which has an impact on the body's ability  produce creatine naturally).

Moreover, while creatine can be used as a strength enhancer and a cognitive booster, it may also have an important role in the prevention and treatment of neurodegeneration. Creatine may offer protection to Alzheimer's patients. It's also being used by Parkinson's patients as way to slow the progression of the disease. These effects, combined with its beneficial impacts on strength and endurance (both important health factors for longevity), lead me to believe that creatine is an indispensable part of any life extension strategy.

Creatine can be found at most supplement stores. And now that its available in pill format it's become very easy and convenient to take. So give it a try and see if it works for you.

Jared Diamond: Agriculture the "worst mistake in the history of the human race."

Back in 1987 Jared Diamond wrote a piece for Discover magazine titled, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race." While I don't necessarily agree with all his claims, Diamond brings up some interesting points that serve to re-enforce the position held by those interested in the ancestral health movement and the Paleo diet. He contends that the advent of agriculture gave rise to not just diseases and epidemics, deep class divisions, and sexual inequality, but to poorer human health as well.

He writes:

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.

Quite obviously one can make a strong case that the agricultural revolution, while awful for human health, was profoundly beneficial to human civilization. Sure, agriculture and civilization has caused some problems, but we are consciously working to lessen the impacts of class divisions, sexual inequality, the ravages of disease, and our environmental impact on the planet. It's because of human civilization and its institutions that we have been able to develop science and technologies that are progressively helping us make this world a better place to live. Now, we have a considerable amount of work to do in this regard—and we may not succeed—but the overall humanitarian benefits that these technologies could bring in the future are substantial.

I'm not one to think that we should have stayed as hunters and gatherers. The human trajectory seems destined for something greater than both our Paleolithic infancy and our current post-industrial adolescence. Here's to hoping that humanity can reach an enlightened adulthood.

Oh, and in the meantime, eat Paleo.

Cynthia Kenyon: Experiments that hint of longer lives | TED

What controls aging? Biochemist Cynthia Kenyon has found a simple genetic mutation that can double the lifespan of a simple worm, C. Elegans. The lessons from that discovery, and others, are pointing to how we might one day significantly extend youthful human life.

Sentient Developments Podcast for the week of November 14, 2011

The latest episode of the Sentient Developments podcast has been posted.

iTunes people can subscribe here. Or you can just subscribe to the RSS. You can download the episode directly here (mp3).

This week I talk about octopus intelligence, the rise of wrongful birth suits in Israel and elsewhere, and the latest news and findings into autism. I also reprise the talk I gave on designer psychologies at the H+ conference at Parson's University in NYC earlier this year. Lastly, I discuss how religion works as a reproduction control system.

Music used in this episode:

• "At Last" by Plaid
• "Hours" by Tycho
• "Ballad of Gloria Featherbottom" by Mux Mool

NS: The dope on mental enhancement

Susan Watts has penned an article for New Scientist in which she asks, "Yet another survey has revealed surprisingly large numbers of people using drugs to boost their mental powers. What should be done?" She writes:

So-called cognitive-enhancing drugs are usually prescribed to treat medical conditions, but they are also known for their ability to improve memory or focus. Many people buy them over the internet, which is risky because they don't know what they are getting. We also know next to nothing about their long-term effects on the brains of healthy people, particularly the young. But some scientists believe they could have a beneficial role to play in society, if properly regulated.

So who's taking what? The BBC's flagship current affairs show Newsnight and New Scientist ran an anonymous online questionnaire to find out. I also decided to try a cognitive enhancer for myself.

The questionnaire was completed by 761 people, with 38 per cent saying they had taken a cognitive-enhancing drug at least once. Of these, nearly 40 per cent said they had bought the drug online and 92 per cent said they would try it again.

In the article, Watts goes on to describe her experience on modafinil:

On the second day I felt more focused and in control and thought I performed better in the tests. That was the day I had been given modafinil. Rowe summed up my performance: "What we've seen today is some very striking improvements… in memory and, for example, your planning abilities and on impulsivity."

She also talked to transhumanist Anders Sandberg:

It's not just students who claim to find the drug beneficial. Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford talks openly about using cognitive-enhancing drugs. He is about to start a study in Germany to compare the effects of a range of cognitive enhancers, including two hormones – ghrelin, which promotes hunger, and oxytocin, which is associated with empathy – to test their powers at what he calls "moral enhancement".

"Once we have figured out how morality works as an emotional and mental system there might be ways of improving it," he told me.

Read more.

Sentient Developments podcast for the week of November 7, 2011

The latest episode of the Sentient Developments podcast has been posted.

This week I talk about my recent trip to Burning Man.

iTunes people can subscribe here. Or you can just subscribe to the RSS. You can download the episode directly here (mp3).

Orion: Deep inside the mind of the octopus

It's long been suspected that some cephalopods, like the octopus, are highly intelligent and sophisticated animals. In fact, it's because of this suspicion that I've short-listed them as a candidate species at the IEET's Rights of Non-Human Persons program (including the African grey parrot). Now the good news is that the science is increasingly backing up these assumptions. Check out this fascinating article in Orion: Deep Intellect: Inside the mind of the octopus. Highlights:

Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.

And:

Measuring the minds of other creatures is a perplexing problem. One yardstick scientists use is brain size, since humans have big brains. But size doesn’t always match smarts. As is well known in electronics, anything can be miniaturized. Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid—before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math.

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

“Meeting an octopus,” writes Godfrey-Smith, “is like meeting an intelligent alien.” Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom—until it swims away.

Read the entire article.

Economist: Difference engine and the Luddite legacy

There's a good article in the Economist about the automation revolution that's in full swing: Difference Engine: Luddite legacy. I find it strange that more people aren't talking about this, instead choosing to gripe about economic globalization, or blaming current unemployment rates on either inept governments or greedy corporations. It's becoming increasingly obvious that technologies are replacing jobs in a way that's been predicted for nearly two centuries. The difference now, however, is that both blue and white collar jobs (i.e. knowledge workers) are in danger of being replaced by automation systems.

Some snippets from the article worth reading:

The conventional explanation for America's current plight is that, at an annualised 2.5% for the most recent quarter (compared with an historical average of 3.3%), the economy is simply not expanding fast enough to put all the people who lost their jobs back to work. Consumer demand, say economists like Dr Tyson, is evidently not there for companies to start hiring again. Clearly, too many chastened Americans are continuing to pay off their debts and save for rainy days, rather than splurging on things they may fancy but can easily manage without.

There is a good deal of truth in that. But it misses a crucial change that economists are loth to accept, though technologists have been concerned about it for several years. This is the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.

This is unlike the job destruction and creation that has taken place continuously since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as machines gradually replaced the muscle-power of human labourers and horses. Today, automation is having an impact not just on routine work, but on cognitive and even creative tasks as well. A tipping point seems to have been reached, at which AI-based automation threatens to supplant the brain-power of large swathes of middle-income employees.

That makes a huge, disruptive difference. Not only is AI software much cheaper than mechanical automation to install and operate, there is a far greater incentive to adopt it—given the significantly higher cost of knowledge workers compared with their blue-collar brothers and sisters in the workshop, on the production line, at the check-out and in the field.

And this:

The process has clearly begun. And it is not just white-collar knowledge workers and middle managers who are being automated out of existence. As data-analytics, business-intelligence and decision-making software do a better and cheaper job, even professionals are not immune to the job-destruction trend now underway. Pattern-recognition technologies are making numerous highly paid skills redundant.

Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it.

Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage.

Read the entire article.

New podcast episode for the week of October 31, 2011

The latest episode of the Sentient Developments podcast is up.

This week I discuss primal transhumanism and the seemingly contradictory trend towards ancestral health that's happening in the futurist community. To that end I address the paleo diet, functional fitness, and the importance of sleep. In the second half of the episode I discuss the recent lawsuit launched by PETA in which they accuse SeaWorld of enslaving orca whales. In this suit, PETA claims that the US Constitution backs up their claim as the 13th mention makes no mention of the kinds of persons it's set up to protect.

iTunes people can subscribe here. Or you can just subscribe to the RSS. You can download the episode directly here (mp3).

PETA to sue SeaWorld under US slavery law

I tend to have a love/hate relationship with PETA. The hate part, I'd say, stems from their often outlandish, sensationalistic and highly inappropriate campaigns.Their tactics often hint at a rather underdeveloped and unsophisticated approach to animal welfare. Can it truly be said that PETA has made a difference to animals?

Regardless, every once in a while PETA does something that makes me realize that I can't stay mad at them for long, and this is one of those times: PETA is accusing SeaWorld of enslaving orca whales—and they're using the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution to enforce their claim. According to the PETA website:

In the first case of its kind, PETA, three marine-mammal experts, and two former orca trainers are filing a lawsuit asking a federal court to declare that five wild-caught orcas forced to perform at SeaWorld are being held as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The filing—the first ever seeking to apply the 13th Amendment to nonhuman animals—names the five orcas as plaintiffs and also seeks their release to their natural habitats or seaside sanctuaries.

The suit is based on the plain text of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits the condition of slavery without reference to "person" or any particular class of victim. "Slavery is slavery, and it does not depend on the species of the slave any more than it depends on gender, race, or religion," says general counsel to PETA, Jeffrey Kerr.

The five wild-captured orca plaintiffs are Tilikum and Katina (both confined at SeaWorld Orlando) and Kasatka, Corky, and Ulises (all three confined at SeaWorld San Diego).

"All five of these orcas were violently seized from the ocean and taken from their families as babies. They are denied freedom and everything else that is natural and important to them while kept in small concrete tanks and reduced to performing stupid tricks," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery, and these orcas are, by definition, slaves."

This is all sorts of awesome, particularly the language being used—namely the language of nonhuman personhood. I am absolutely on board with this suit. The orca whale, along with other cetaceans, are most certainly persons (see What is a person?). Furthermore, I'd say the same consideration should be given to other nonhuman persons, including elephants and all the great apes (which would have implications for zoos and circuses).

I'm also excited to see that the US Constitution is being interpreted and applied in this way. Because the 13th Amendment makes no mention of human persons per se, it can be assumed that all persons, regardless of species, should be included. Personally, I don't think this is a trick of language or omission; I believe it's within the spirit of the law.

And at the heart of the matter, of course, is the issue of animal exploitation—the suggestion that highly sapient and emotional creatures are being used as slaves. As I've written before (see Putting an end to dolphin exploitation at aquatic theme parks), these nonhuman animals are capable of exhibiting their discontent and dissatisfaction with their conditions—whether it be through their body language, disobedience, or the expression of sheer emotional defeat. That an animal rights group is working to protect their interests with an existing body of law is exciting. It's exactly what we're trying to do at the Rights of Non-Human Persons Program, which is to give these nonhuman persons the same legal protections that humans have.

Now all this said, PETA and company have their work cut out for them. Just because I agree with their interpretation of the Constitution doesn't mean that the courts will. In fact, the courts will likely err on the side of prejudice and ignorance, and proclaim that PETA's claim is not within the "spirit" of the Constitution, or some other unimaginative drivel like that.

Indeed, a quick scan of the media's coverage of PETA's lawsuit is discouraging. Most outlets are using disparaging language to describe PETA's efforts and are lumping it in with their other "outrageous stunts" (see TIME's coverage).

It's also obvious that the lucrative aquatic theme park industry will not go down without a fight. As highlighted in the documentary, The Cove, this is big business with global reach.

And regrettably, there is already a segment of the population that is taking great offence to this issue. Take the response of David Steinberg, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, who called the suit "patently, absolutely frivolous":

The 13th Amendment abolished the abhorrent, despicable practice of the slavery of human beings. PETA is demeaning the integrity and humanity of people who were owned as slaves. That is outrageous.

Steinberg's contention, that we shouldn't recognize nonhuman persons as slaves because it would demean those whose ancestors were once held as slaves, is deeply problematic. It is this exact sentiment that must be addressed, combated, and ultimately destroyed if the supporters of this issue wish to succeed. Nothing is preventing the furthering of animal rights more than this idea—and it's the same idea that has prevented the broadening of rights throughout human history. It's the seemingly endless reprise of the situation in which the "in" group, for whatever reason, is reluctant to expand the circle of rights and include the "out" group because it would somehow lessen or threaten what it means to be in the "in" group. What it is is patent nonsense.

Steinberg's comment is particularly pernicious for three reasons.

First, it's the seductive and easy response—the one that appeals to most people's conservative nature and their reluctance to think too deeply about instigating change. Most people don't like to upset the apple cart.

Second, it represents the exact opposite of what would actually happen. Protecting and broadening the rights of minority groups can only increase the dignity and integrity of both those who grant them and those who would benefit from them. It's what makes an enlightened and progressive society exactly that—it's what endows our species with the integrity and humanity that Steinberg claims is under threat.

Third, the claim that some people might feel lessened or demeaned by the suggestion that some nonhuman persons are slaves still doesn't make it right or invalid. People get offended all the time. We can't let that stop the correct course of action. Taking offence to something, or feeling "demeaned" by a piece of legislation, is not the fault of the legislation. Rather, it's the fault of the person allowing themselves to feel that way. It's a kind of "yuck factor ethics", which is not really ethics at all. Furthermore, granting rights to nonhuman persons would in no real or tangible way lessen what it means to be human. We'll retain our humanity and our rights regardless of whether or not we grant them outside the species.

My suspicion is that the fear driving this sentiment is that we'd lose our exalted human place on top of the food chain. Well, to that I say: Too bad. Rights and protections need to be granted to those who both deserve and need them.

Best of luck to PETA as they move to push this law suit forward.

Automation Nation: Will Robots Take Our Jobs? [video]

Check out this conversation between Robin Hanson and Martin Ford on the future of the American economy and the role of intelligent computers and robots. The primary question tackled: Will rapid technological innovations aid American workers, or will it render large numbers of American workers obsolete?

Nice quote from Hanson:

"When machines are really powerful and can do lots of things you only need to own a few machines to be able to own a lot and survive and be prosperous and wealthy. So, once machines are so good that people can't compete with them we will have a vastly [more] prosperous world where we have all these productive machines and owning some of these machines will be enough. We need to make a smooth transition so that people start to buy capital so that they can own these machines and be productive and wealthy."

The episode is from the PBS show, "Ideas in Action", which in this segment features a half hour discussion about information technology -- in particular robots/AI -- and its impact on the future job market and economy. The show will air on PBS stations beginning this Sunday, but is available online now.

NYT: More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People

The New York Times has published an article about how robotics, automation and information technologies are increasingly impacting on the dwindling job market. The article was posted in consideration of a new book titled Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. Excerpt from the NYT article:

Technology has always displaced some work and jobs. Over the years, many experts have warned — mistakenly — that machines were gaining the upper hand. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes warned of a “new disease” that he termed “technological unemployment,” the inability of the economy to create new jobs faster than jobs were lost to automation.

But Mr. Brynjolfsson and Mr. McAfee argue that the pace of automation has picked up in recent years because of a combination of technologies including robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized inventory control, voice recognition and online commerce.

Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognizing patterns. So automation is rapidly moving beyond factories to jobs in call centers, marketing and sales — parts of the services sector, which provides most jobs in the economy.

Here's a description of the book:

Why has median income stopped rising in the US?

Why is the share of population that is working falling so rapidly?

Why are our economy and society are becoming more unequal?

A popular explanation right now is that the root cause underlying these symptoms is technological stagnation-- a slowdown in the kinds of ideas and inventions that bring progress and prosperity.

In Race Against the Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there's been no stagnation in technology -- in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating. Recent advances are the stuff of science fiction: computers now drive cars in traffic, translate between human languages effectively, and beat the best human Jeopardy! players.

As these examples show, digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie.

But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.

In Race Against the Machine Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring together a range of statistics, examples, and arguments to show that technological progress is accelerating, and that this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and jobs. The book makes the case that employment prospects are grim for many today not because there's been technology has stagnated, but instead because we humans and our organizations aren't keeping up.

New podcast episode available

The latest episode of the Sentient Developments podcast has been posted.

This week I discuss bulletproof coffees, my visit to Occupy Toronto, Propaganda 2.0 and the rise of narrative networks, Ray Kurzweil's response to Paul Allen, and the potential link between ETI's and time travel.

iTunes people can subscribe here. Or you can just subscribe to the RSS. You can download the episode directly here (mp3).

Todd Kuiken: A prosthetic arm that "feels" | TED

Surgeon and engineer Todd Kuiken is building a prosthetic arm that connects with the human nervous system -- improving motion, control and even feeling. In this TED talk, Kuiken brings patient Amanda Kitts onstage to help demonstrate this next-gen robotic arm.

Careful now, you may be the 1%

The Occupy Wall Street chant of, "We are the 99%" got me thinking: Where do I stand in terms of wealth from a global perspective? Thankfully, I found an online calculator, the Global Rich List, that helped me find the answer.

To my surprise, I am firmly placed within the top 1% as far as global salaries go--and chances are you are, too. If you make more than USD$47,500 per year, then you are the top 1%. Going down from there, you are in the top 5% if your annual salary is $35,000, and within the top 10% if it's at at least $25,000. This is what happens when you have a planet of 6.8 billion people and 80% of them live on less than $10 a day.

So just keep that in mind when you smugly proclaim that you're one of the have-nots.

Taking a more local perspective, and considering just the United States alone (I unfortunately do not have figures for elsewhere), if your salary is $87,000 you are within the top 10%. You're in the top 5% if you make at least $120,000. Median salary in the U.S. is around $25,000. Further breakdowns are available here.

Doctors warming to Paleo diet

A growing number of scientists, medical doctors and nutritionists have argued that a Stone Age lifestyle could benefit human health and even cure chronic diseases. Check out this surprisingly good video series that was recently put together by CBS:

Propaganda 2.0 and the rise of 'narrative networks'

DARPA, the Pentagon's advanced concepts think-tank, is looking to take propaganda to the next level and they're hoping to do so by controlling the very way their targets perceive and interpret the flow of incoming information. The Pentagon believes that by engaging in 'narrative control' they can alter an individual's grasp on reality and the way in which they evaluate current events. Simply put, DARPA is looking to shape minds with stories.

Now, this isn't an entirely new concept. The notion of narrative control, or narrative networks, has been bunted around for a few years now.

It's been said that history books are written by the victors. Well, these days hopeful victors are trying to write current events. State actors are increasingly disclosing information in a way that constructs a kind of story. It's through the careful construction of desirable narratives that state actors are hoping to control the beliefs and actions of targeted audiences. It's a classic case of the pen being mightier than the sword -- but in this case it's a pen that digs deep into the very psyche of the individual.

The United States has been engaging in narrative control for quite some time now. Most recently, during the Arab Spring, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weaved a tale that suggested a certain level of inevitability to the events unfolding in the Middle East. One by one, she contended, authoritarian and fundamentalist nations were being overthrown by angry and forward-looking populaces. It'll only be a matter of time, Clinton argued, before the entire Middle East goes through a transformation that sees all its countries embrace democracy, secular institutions, and unprecedented freedoms.

Now I'm not suggesting that this isn't a valid interpretation of events. It very well may be. But what's important to understand here is that the U.S. is presenting this narrative in a very overt and calculated way. For many of those in the Middle East, the story is most certainly compelling and potentially inspiring. And for those sitting on the fence or considering radical action, this story of apparent inevitability may compel them to join the "winning team." It's through this kind of narrative control and reality building that the U.S. hopes to fight terrorism and the spread of radical Islam.

But now DARPA wants to take this further and make it more scientific and systematic. They recently put out a request for research proposals in the areas of:

• Quantitative analysis of narratives
• Understanding the effects narratives have on human psychology and its affiliated neurobiology
• Modeling, simulating, and sensing-especially in stand-off modalities-these narrative influences

DARPA would like to revolutionize the study of narrative influence by "advancing narrative analysis and neuroscience so as to create new narrative influence sensors, doubling status quo capacity to forecast narrative influence."

This is pretty heavy stuff. They're asking scientists to "take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion." Once such a system is put into place, the Pentagon will be able to detect terrorists or other non-state actors who have been indoctrinated with a particular ideology or worldview, and then respond with a counter-message of its own. As Dawn Lim notes in Wired, "They can also target groups vulnerable to terrorists’ recruiting tactics with their own counter-messaging."

Lim describes how the project will unfold:

In the first 18-month phase of the program, the Pentagon wants researchers to study how stories infiltrate social networks and alter our brain circuits. One of the stipulated research goals: to “explore the function narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how they can influence a person or group’s choice of means (such as indiscriminate violence) to achieve political ends.”

Once scientists have perfected the science of how stories affect our neurochemistry, they will develop tools to “detect narrative influence.” These tools will enable “prevention of negative behavioral outcomes … and generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building trust.” In other words, the tools will be used to detect who’s been controlled by subversive ideologies, better allowing the military to drown out that message and win people onto their side.

“The government is already trying to control the message, so why not have the science to do it in a systematic way?” said the researcher familiar with the project.

When the project enters into a second 18-month phase, it’ll use the research gathered to build “optimized prototype technologies in the form of documents, software, hardware and devices.” What will these be? Existing technology can carry out micro-facial feature analysis, and measure the dilation of blood vessels and eye pupils. MRI machines can determine which parts of your brain is lighting up when it responds to stories. Darpa wants to do even better.

DARPA is even calling for devices that detect the influence of stories in unseen ways: “Efforts that rely solely on standoff/non-invasive/non-detectable sensors are highly encouraged."

"Stories are important in security contexts," DARPA argues, "[stories] change the course of insurgencies, frame negotiations, play a role in political radicalization, influence the methods and goals of violent social movements." Indeed, they've been thinking a lot about this recently, as indicated by their April workshop to discuss the neurobiology of narratives.

When it comes to security, little consideration is given to ethics. Now, while I'm somewhat partial to this approach on account of its bloodlessness, I have to admit that the potential for abuse is astonishing. Once these narrative networks reach full maturity they could be used to indoctrinate not just enemy populations, but more familiar ones as well. The very ways in which domestic affairs are perceived could be colored by a security department hoping to create a docile and abiding population.

That said, the efficacy of narrative networks has yet to be determined. The Internet and other communications networks may serve as a kind of prophylactic against narrow bands of information. Moreover, populations may become primed against such efforts in the same way current societies are (relatively) immune to traditional and obvious methods of propaganda.

As a final word, this topic interests me greatly as it relates to memetics, memetic engineering, and the whole concept of cultural health. In this context, the struggle against religious fundamentalism is a struggle against the onset and dissemination of bad memes. Fundamentalist memeplexes can be interpreted as information viruses that are running amok in the human population. Perhaps it's not too outrageous to suggest that we should counter bad ideas with good ideas -- or at least better ideas that lead to more rational thinking, criticality and independent thought.

The best defense against religious extremism is a mind primed to reject those ideas in the first place.

The Sentient Developments podcast is back!

It's been three years since my last podcast, but I'm back in the saddle and looking to produce a steady stream of new episodes. Those of you on iTunes can subscribe here. Or you can just subscribe directly to the RSS. Or visit the podcast blog. And please help to get the word out!

A new episode was released yesterday and it can be downloaded here (mp3). I talk about the Technological Singularity (in honour of the recently concluded Singularity Summit 2011 in NYC) and the Occupy Wall Street movement.