I believe some pretty sketchy things:

• I believe that the premise of strong AI is sound.
• I believe that artificial life is already here.
• I believe the premise of molecular nanotechnology is sound.
• I believe the premise of cryonics.
• I believe the premise of brain taping.

Given that I believe all that (I blame years of science fiction and an abortive career in physics.) more reasonable stuff like space elevators and the cure for aging are pretty tame.

But what I never understood about these subjects is how they drive some people to get all, well, starry eyed and religious about them. There is always something about the future that gets people all dreamy. They assume somehow paradise will emerge and everything will get all cleaned up and solved. Then the handwaving starts:

• Post-humans will perpetually happy, all forms of suffering will end.
• God can be engineered and it'll love us.
• Nanotechnology and superautomation will usher in a post-scarcity world but, I guess some of us didn't get that memo.

I flatly and categorically disagree with this handwaving. It's handwaving like this that got us into serious trouble in the past. The trouble with most thinking about technological singularities is that it encourages sloppy thinking. A lot of people in futurist circles reach a point in their exposition where they get very vague on how to get from here to there.

Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon. I remember, as a child back in the Seventies, reading these beautifully illustrated essays in an encyclopea about Gerard O'Neill's space colonies and then watching video from the Apollo-Soyouz mission. Even then the juxtaposition was very informative to me. I think what I learned was that the eventually the future becomes the present and the wonderous becomes commonplace and problematic.

I keep harping on this point but, I repeat it here. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. This suggests to me that the idea of Heaven and Utopia are logically flawed.

Futurists would do well to avoid this kind of thinking.

Preface

Ever since Vinge's innovation feedback loop idea was introduced to me nearly twenty years ago, I've always been very interested in searching for and understanding the damping mechanisms for it. I had a feeling that Vinge and especially Kurzweil have oversimplified. This was something that I suspected vaguely for quite some time but Bob Seidensticker's book gave me the coherent rebuttal that I was looking for.

This will be the first of a series of essays where I try to examine each of Seidensticker's points in turn.

The Futuristic Vision

In the movie, The Matrix, there were several scenes where the characters had access to some kind of perfect accelerated learning process. I winced when I saw those scenes. It was almost as bad as violating thermodynamics by positing humans as energy sources for the robot civilization.

I had a hard time with this because in the few seconds Neo learned martial arts and Trinity learned how to fly a helicopter, their poor little monkey brains would have been cooked by a molecular activity needed to make these changes possible.

It wouldn't be, "Whoa, I know kung-fu!" It would be, "AAAAAH! MY BRAIN IS MELTING! I THINK MY SKULL WILL EXPLODE FROM THE SUPERHEATED STEAM GENERATED BY ALL THE NANOBOTS FURIOUSLY WORKING IN MY HEAD!"

(Ahem. Sorry. It's a very funny image. I picture Keanu standing there woodenly, drooling, with steaming gray matter burping from his ears and nostrils.)

The human brain is not a hard drive. The complex motor skills and experiences represented by tap dancing or martial arts is not a simple file you can copy into the cerebellum in the space of seconds. One day, to write and edit memories in our heads, nanobots probably will reshape, prune and rebuild neurons and synapses, molecule by molecule but, they will go slowly so as to not cook us. Such nanobots would be the last word in accelerated learning.

But long before that, there should be other avenues open to us.

The Near Term

There was a science fiction story by A. E. Van Vogt, where one of the lead characters had a wide variety of tools to speed up and enhance the learning process. They included such things as hypnotic and subliminal stimulation, drugs that increased the plasticity of memory, organizational methods, fact chunking, lateral thinking, mnemonics and so on. This story was written in 1939.

Not really a lot has come of this, has it?

Subliminal suggestion has largely been debunked. Hypnosis only seems to have a limited ability to aid memory retention and is very hard to make reliable. Drugs that aid memory, creativity and concentration--caffeine, nicotine, ritalin, inositol, etc.--are still very primitive. And we've all read and discarded self-help books that promised us better ways to digest and memorize large volumes of information. Time-management never really seems to crawl out of the self-help ghetto to form a genuine pedagogical revolution.

Why is it that education is so persistently primitive? It really hasn't changed that much since the early 19th century. Frankly it hasn't changed much in the last 10,000 years. You could take a teacher from 1906 and drop him or her into a classroom in 2006 and, aside from hating the computers, which really wouldn't make them unique, they really wouldn't have a hard time adjusting to it. You can't do the same thing to an engineer or doctor from 1906, too much has changed.

You stick a bunch of kids into a room, lecture at them for hours on end, assign them a bunch of uninspired make-work and hope that enough of them will learn to read, write and do sums to prevent your economy from collapsing.

The Frustratingly Slow Progress of Pedagogy

Computers and other pedagogical technology have been a huge expense for schools, public and private, and still not a lot has come from it. Schools seem to be perversely resistant to techno-fixes:

• Edison predicted in the 1920s that film would replace textbooks.
• In the 1940s and 50s, radio and television were introduced into classrooms.
• In the 1960s B. F. Skinner imagined behaviorist teaching machines and programmed learning to double the rate students could learn.
• Remember New Math?
• In the late 1970s and early 80s personal computers began to be introduced into the more prestigious high schools of the United States. (I know because I was in one them.)

Personal computers have been in classrooms for nearly thirty years and still no great revolution has come from them. Seymore Papert, Doug Englebart, Ted Nelson and others have explored this issue and each proposed innovative solutions for it but still not a lot has come of it.

The grading curve really hasn't shifted at all. The population of remedial students hasn't diminished. The population of achieving students hasn't increased. In fact, we still seem to get geniuses despite schooling, not because of schooling. The students that do poorly aren't necessarily stupid. In fact some might be so smart and idiosyncratic, classrooms are simply a waste of their time.

Actually perhaps I'm being a bit pessimistic. Actually novel technologies and approaches have reached some students who wouldn't be reachable in any other ways. I remember some wonderful educational films and documentaries. I remember some well written textbooks that I even appreciated at the tender age of eight. I remember so good teachers and some really bad ones.

The point is why aren't they all good? Why is education still a shotgun method? Why are learning disabilities so intractable? Why is progress in this area so agonizingly slow?

This is an important point for the Kurzweil crowd to consider because this appalling waste of talent slows all technical and social progress in general.

Anyway that wraps this one up. Expect another in about a month's time. Comments?

Cross-posted from Farlops Industries!

Here is some shameless, unfounded speculation copied from my site, Farlops Industries, which is up and running again after a hiatus of 7 months:

A week ago I read a short story by Tad Williams about the spontaneous emergence of sapience from the Internet. It wasn't really that good. Arthur Clarke did it many decades earlier and did it much better.

Anyway, uninformed amateur scientist that I am, I'm skeptical that consciousness will emerge from our computer networks as long as they are organized as they are. It may be true, using crude numerical comparisons of moving parts, that the Internet is at least as complex as a single vertebrate brain. But this ignores several key issues.

To explain what I mean, let me pose the following images and metaphors.

1. Suppose we have a tiny clump of cells, just recently differentiated into neurons, that sit at the top of the notochord of a developing mammalian embryo. This is where all mammal brains, where all vertebrate brains, start. It begins here.
2. However let's further suppose that the embryo is infected with strange microscopic parasites which have somehow taken control of each nerve cell, of each cell in the embryo's body.
3. These parasites take over and steer the embryo's histological development to meet their own goals.
4. The parasites dedicate the neurons to performing tasks that have nothing to do with tissue organization or organ formation.
5. The parasites control how the neurons communicate and function at all levels. None of this communication or function has anything to do with the normal histological development of an embryo.

Do you begin to see my point?

What's happening here is that parasites never allow the embryo to develop sentience because they are using the cells to do things that have nothing to do normal embryo development. The neurons aren't really neurons anymore because they aren't allowed to function like normal neurons.

Substitute "humans" for "parasites," "computers" for "neurons" and I think it becomes clear. Computers aren't programmed to function like neurons or stem cells. They programmed to function like word processors, e-mail clients, game machines, bank databases, graphics editors, web servers and so on. It doesn't matter that we've hooked them all up into a network. The communication between these machines is nothing like the communication between differentiating stem cells in evolving brain tissue.

This is why consciousness will never emerge from the Internet. It won't emerge until we completely change the focus of all the computers on it.

It's my opinion that desktop computers, making rough numerical comparisons of moving parts, are already as complex as individual mammalian neurons. Computational neurologists have already written simulation software that can model individual neurons with reasonable accuracy and speed that can run on ordinary desktop workstations. Computational neurologists have now moved on to more ambitious goals.

IBM's Blue Brain Project uses some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to model something called a cortical column. A neocortical column is an organized collection of about 80 to 120 neurons all connected together in a space of one cubic millimeter. The surface of the neocortex of mammals, the part of the brain that has all the folds, is composed of hundreds of thousands of cortical columns.

This should give us some idea what we're up against.

We'd need a few hundred thousand Blue Brain machines are all communicating as cortical columns would before we can start talking seriously about the strong formulation of artificial intelligence, let alone the spontaneous emergance of consciousness from the the Internet.

Moore's law suggests that it's only a matter of time before comsumer-grade computers can run something like the Blue Brain simulator as a low level process. Think of the SETI@Home program that analyzes small blocks of radio telescope data. This program runs as a screen saver during idle time when you're not using your computer for something else. Now imagine if the Blue Brain simulator was set to work in a similar way.

The simulator might hog all your bandwidth as it communicated with other simulators on the Internet. Other times it would be quiet. It would all depend on what the simulators were thinking about. Some simulators would have frequent heavy loads while others would hardly see use at all.

This still wouldn't be true consciousness though because we've ignored connecting these synthetic neurons to some sort of body or senses. The closest analogy I can think of is the brain tissue of an embryo before birth. There is very little sense data and the body isn't complete yet.

But at last we'd be getting somewhere. Strong AI would be with reach. Such a scheme might have a lot to teach us about organic brains.

Cross-posted from Farlops Industries!

This is the first of what is to be small number of blog posts here. The reason they are going to be rare is because I have my own site with its own blog and, frankly I can only generate a tiny number of novel thoughts on any given day. Sorry, my site gets most of them.

I am upgrading my site blog tool however, and my live site is currently in stasis so, I'll put something here. That said, on to my first rant.

My understanding of Vinge's singularity idea leads me to think that we've already passed through several similar inflection points already. The society we live in now would only be vaguely conceivable to people living in medieval Eurasia. Our present is a future they never would have imagined. Our world is their vingian singularity. Medieval society is the vingian singularity to tribal people. Human tribal culture is the vingian singularity to other apes.

Does that seem like a valid analogy to draw?

If it is, take a look around. It's not exactly paradise is it?

Our world has a lot of fun bits and some depressing and frustrating bits. It's a ball of confusion, in the immortal words of the Temptations. We've conquered old problems so completely nobody even thinks about them anymore and yet we've opened up new problems nobody a century ago would have dreamed of. Would visionaries like Verne or Wells have imagined something as trivially annoying as e-mail spam?

So I ask, why do we assume the inflection points, the intelligence augmentations to come will bring paradise? Isn't it possible that it will just bring a new muddle that is superhumanly complex and contradictory?

Please understand that I am not saying that Vinge's singularity idea is invalid. The logic of the idea seems pretty tight to me. I am not saying the future is going to be some sort of horrible dystopia either. There's probably going to be many wondrous things accomplished and many wondrous things done but, usually what happens when the miraculous becomes commonplace is that it stops being remarkable.

I'm just saying it's going to be a mixed bag.

Cross-posted from Farlops Industries!