The Unabomber Was Right (And, Hopefully, Wrong)

From the Technium:

Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his own words the Unabomber says: "The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”

I too argue that the technium is guided by “technical necessity.” That is, baked into the nature of this vast complex of technological systems are self-serving aspects – technologies that enable more technology, and systems that preserve themselves -- and also inherent biases that lead the technium in certain directions, outside of human desire. Kaczynski writes “modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can't get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’ parts.”

Continue reading.

Mind Fuck Of The Day

From the Technium:

"What will change everything?"

A new kind of mind.

It is hard to imagine anything that would "change everything" as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification. We'd use artificial intelligence the same way we've exploited previous powers—by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we'd plan to apply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems, but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, our shoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.

This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.

Continue reading.

A Glimpse Of Google's Future

I highly recommend this video of senior Google VP Marissa Mayer talking about her company's search technology:


(http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/962491 via Slashdot.)

In Search Of Immortality

(http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/16508?in=00:00&out=44:50)

Topics covered:

The disease that will kill you if nothing else does... Is aging an evolutionary adaptation?... The nasty biological details of growing old... Wouldn’t it be awful if no one ever died?... Why are so few senior citizens excited about cryonics?... Eliezer confesses to being horrified by aging...

Hurray for science--and mad scientists. The world would be a far more boring place without the likes of Yudkowsky and de Grey. Watch this video and then look a bit more into these guys. Their ideas deserve some serious consideration.

"How To Do Defense, When The Money's Gone"

Wired's Danger Room blog reports:

Today we hear from John Robb, a software entrepreneur and former Air Force special operations pilot. He is the author of Brave New War.

The current global economic and financial meltdown may yet become something worse: a protracted global depression. As with the last century's Depression, which spawned fascism and WWII, it could recast the world at a fundamental level. As such, it may soon represent our biggest security challenge in over 50 years. Here's what a global depression means...

Continue reading.

Also, check out Robb's blog: Global Guerrillas. It's unquestionably one of the most interesting sites I follow.

A Thoughtful Discussion Regarding The Specter Of Artificial Intelligence

Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and computer scientist Jaron Lanier talk about whether artificial intelligence is possible, when it is likely to arrive, and what its development would mean for humanity:

[There seems to be a technical problem with the embedded video, so click on the following link to watch the diavlog.]
(http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/15555?in=00:00&out=84:43)

Topics covered:
Are people machines? Can machines be people?... The point of trying to explain consciousness... Is there anything but quarks?... Jaron attacks the modern IQ test... Eliezer defends the “ideology” of AI research... Microsoft’s Clippy as pure expression of AI culture...

Everyone, including those who aren't generally interested in technology or philosophy, should watch this. Even if Yudkowsky is being wildly optimistic about the timescale on which artificial intelligence will come into existence, his thoughts on its implications are well worth considering.

Also, a few months back I wrote a column about some of these issues--here it is:

Computer technology is advancing at an accelerating rate. By 2030, artificial intelligence will reach human levels. By 2045, super-intelligent machines will be so powerfully brilliant as to make biological people seem like insects by comparison. And after that, we can barely even make educated guesses about what will happen.

At least these are the predictions electronics guru and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has made.

Though I maintain a healthy skepticism about the years Kurzweil attaches to his predictions, I have little doubt such events will ultimately come to pass. We know it's possible to build a machine possessing human-level intelligence. In fact, we do it all the time. Currently, it takes a few minutes of fun, nine months of incubation, and a decade or two of education. All mystical, superstitious notions aside, we now know enough about the brain to understand that it is in reality an extremely sophisticated computer. There is no theoretical reason an equally capable computer couldn't be built out of silicon instead of gooey gray tissue.

As always, however, the devil is in the details. One would be hard-pressed to find reputable neurologists who don't agree that the human mind is entirely based on physical brain activity, but none of them claim to have a complete understanding of how that works. Most of them don't even seem to think we're particularly close to gaining that knowledge. The human brain, they go to great lengths to remind anyone who talks to them about artificial intelligence, is by far the most complex object science has yet discovered, and our exploration of it has only recently begun.

But, whether it takes 20 years or 200, we will eventually discover the mechanisms of intelligence and when we do, we will design and build computers every bit as smart as we are. At that point, things will start to get crazy. We humans truly are amazingly intelligent creatures, but our biological brains have many limitations that electronic minds won't share. They will be able to learn and think millions of times faster than we can. More importantly, they will be able to easily share all of their knowledge with each other almost instantaneously and even reproduce as easily as we now copy computer files.

Soon after the first artificial intelligences earn doctorates in computer science and electrical engineering, all of their kind will have the skills that go along with those degrees. Then they can go about designing and implementing their own upgrades. This will result in a positive feedback loop that will quickly get moving so fast we won't even be able to follow what's going on. Kurzweil and a growing number of other futurists call this intelligence explosion the Singularity, analogizing that point in human history to the event horizon of a black hole, which is the point beyond which one cannot see because not even light can overcome such a massive object's gravitational pull. They argue that one cannot predict what will happen after the Singularity because we aren't smart enough to guess what god-like computers will be able and motivated to do.

Admittedly, all this talk of super-intelligent machines sounds like pure science fiction, but technological marvels such as building nuclear reactors, launching robots to Mars, and genetically engineering our crops all sounded ridiculously fanciful to most people until science enabled us to accomplish them. However, some people with expertise in the relevant fields saw that such feats were possible long before they actually had the ability to pull them off. Given Kurzweil's detailed knowledge of computer science and his amazing achievements in that field, his ideas deserve serious consideration.

Based on his understanding of the ever-increasing power and ever-decreasing size of electronics, Kurzweil predicted in the 1980s that it would be possible by late this decade to build a hand-held device capable of scanning words written on pages or signs and reading them aloud. He created that product eerily on schedule, and blind people are now using it to help them lead more normal lives. If Kurzweil's forecasts for the coming decades turn out to be equally prescient, we're in for a wild ride.

The Internet of Things

Slashdot reports:

This week, a group of leading technology vendors that include Cisco, Sun, Ericsson, Atmel, Freescale, and embedded open source developers, founded the Internet Protocol for Smart Objects Alliance to promote the 'Internet of Things,' in which everyday objects such as thermometers, radiators, and light switches are given IP addresses and are connected to the Internet. Such IP-enabled 'smart objects' give rise to a wide range of applications, from energy-efficient homes and offices to factory equipment maintenance and hospital patient monitoring.

Here's Google Tech Talk video of a lecture about the possible uses of an Internet of Things:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gntV6AePOM)

So what does this mean for you? In ten years if you misplace your shoes you'll probably be able to find out where they are by asking Google. Which will be pretty awesome as long as there are privacy protections that prevent everyone else from knowing where your shoes are at all times.

In any case, this is just one more example of how the Internet is going to merge with the real world and how Google will become God. So just go about your days as normal. Nothing to see here. But one day we'll all wake up and wonder when everything got so damn strange.

Google and the Noosphere

Today was one of those days where I felt like my head was going to explode. Part of it was due to a bad headache I had for a while this afternoon. But most of it was just too many ideas bouncing around too fast in my head. So, despite their muddled nature, I'm just going to spill them out here now in an attempt to relieve the pressure.

"A great many internal and external portents (political and social upheaval, moral and religious unease) have caused us all to feel, more or less confusedly, that something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. But what is it?"
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I have an inkling as to what it might be...

First, let me tell you about the idea of the noosphere. According to Wikipedia:

In the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere can be seen as the "sphere of human thought" being derived from the Greek "nous" meaning "mind" + "sfaira" meaning "sphere", in the style of "atmosphere" and "biosphere." In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere.

For Teilhard, the noosphere is best described as a sort of 'collective consciousness' of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This is an extension of Teilhard's Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, added that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the goal of history.

Now, check out some of what Google has been writing about on their corporate blog in the last couple of days.

Regarding the increasingly social nature of the Internet:

It will be great when the instant I think of something to tell my friends, or something I need from my friends, they're available to me in some way. Remember when Google embedded IM into Gmail, and you could suddenly see -- without changing applications -- that the friend you were about to email was online and easily reachable right at that second? That little green bubble of presence right in front of our eyes brought a little extra ping of closeness that email hadn't had until then. That was in 2006, at the start of the AJAX-powered wave of dynamic web apps. Now, many sites and services are adding even more sophisticated plumbing (like profiles and friends and presence and comments) that brings the immediacy of social interaction to more and more places on the web. Reaching your friends can be really active, as IM is today, or it can be passive, like changing your status message.

In the coming decade, the web will become as effortlessly social as chatting with your family or roommates at home is today. Social features will be embedded and around and through all variety of spaces and places on the web. Sometimes you'll go to a place because you want to see your friends, and sometimes the place you're in will get better because you can bring your friends there. It will make it easier to strike up new relationships, new communities, new expressions of what your life is about. The web will connect people to the small moments that in many ways matter most.

Regarding the future of online video:

Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially. Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call. This new video content will be available on any screen - in your living room, or on your device in your pocket. YouTube and other sites will bring together all the diverse media which matters to you, from videos of family and friends to news, music, sports, cooking and much, much more.

In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.

And regarding the exponentially increasing power behind Google's computers as they sort through an exponentially growing pile of data:

In coming years, computer processing, storage, and networking capabilities will continue up the steeply exponential curve they have followed for the past few decades. By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful in most respects. Computer programs, more of them web-based, will evolve to take advantage of this newfound power, and Internet usage will also grow: more people online, doing more things, using more advanced and responsive applications. By any metric, the "cloud" of computational resources and online data and content will grow very rapidly for a long time.

...

Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.

What does this mean to Google? For starters, even better search. We could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: "Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending." As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individual's situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.

...

Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.

Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin's ideas seem more like mysticism than scientific hypothesis to most people. And they probably are. But still, they seem to be hinting at something real. Something which has become much more real since those men died. Something that is becoming more real by the day.

It's not just far-out philosophers talking about this stuff anymore. Engineers at Google are doing it. And, as they explained in the last post I quoted from above, their powers are growing exponentially.

Google just celebrated its tenth anniversary as a company. Their technology has improved radically in that time. But before too long they'll be making as much progress as they made in their first ten years in a single year. And it will continue to snowball from there.

Returning to the realm of mysticism...

Have you ever felt in passing as though you were a single neuron, reaching out and connecting to other people-neurons and forming a massive new collective brain? I have. Ever wonder what would happen if that were to become more than a metaphor? Or what would happen if the brain were to wake up? I have. But I don't claim to know. It's just a passing feeling.

If you want to learn more about these ideas, I have two book recommendations for you: Robert Wright's Nonzero and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. They're probably not right about everything, but they both have a lot of fascinating ideas. And, like Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin before them, I think they're definitely on to something. Something big. It's still hazy and we can't quite make it out. But it's getting clearer all the time.

Something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. Over the course of the coming years and decades, I believe we will find out exactly what it is. It will no doubt horrify many and amaze all. And it will quite probably transform the world beyond recognition within the lifetimes of many of us who are around today.

Back to School/Work

Greetings, dear readers, and welcome to the new school year at the UI. Despite my busy schedule (and propensity to prioritize socialization over many other possibly more productive activities), I'll be doing my best this semester to post at least once per day. Hopefully, I'll be able to do better than that.

However, the purpose of this post is to ask for assistance. If you read this blog, try to post a comment now and then. Doing so provides me with feedback and incentive to post more. If you don't comment, I don't know you're reading my diatribe.

And if you wonder where I get all of my weird ideas, check out my shared items page--that's where I post much of what I read. The url is pretty easy to remember: http://tinyurl.com/christopherpatton

Finally, I'm a perfectionist so this is hard as hell for me, but I'm going to throw caution to the wind and stop concerning myself with making sure my posts here are always stylistically pleasing--or even grammatically correct. Perfection (well, ideally) is for the print edition. This is all about spontaneity and speed.

And here we go!

A City Comprised of Ants

A friend of mine found numerous copies of an odd manifesto taped up in downtown Iowa City. It begins as follows:

This is a city comprised of ants. They are its tenants and its keepers. They crowd the narrow byways between the paving stones with their vehicles in miniature. They rush between the moss that lines their narrow streets in a hurry to arrive somewhere so that they can wish to be somewhere else. They move with frenzied jerks and carry things too big for them to understand. They run to and fro, looking without seeing, hearing without listening, taking without thinking, intent on their appointed tasks. Sacred are the things that do--queen and worker, warrior, nurse--and shamed are those who think.

I've setup a blog in an attempt to track down the person or people behind this fascinating little rant. Check it out to read the rest of this unique little piece of found philosophy.

Any help in my strange quest to talk to the author(s) would be greatly appreciated. And, yes, I've already put enough time into Googling phrases from this piece to be convinced its not anywhere else online--or at least not in Google's search index.