Who's Behind the Wheel?

As someone who makes regular, long trips by automobile I've been anxiously awaiting an artificial co-piolot alá R2D2 who can take over when I have the urge to reach for that bag of pretzels in the back seat, or maybe even nap. As GPS and Smart Phones became ubiquitous on American highways, I've been counting down the days until this technology reaches the average consumer. In the news this week, another European car manufacturer announced their participation in the already impressive looking SARTRE project. Engadget has a posted a video demonstration. V. Cool. 

The Computational Limits of the Universe and Recursive Creation (Addendum)

In my post The Computational Limits of the Universe and Recursive Creation, I explored the possibilities of the farthest reaches of information technology. As it happens, an outfit from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology embarked on a grandiose (if not slightly domestic) project dubbed the Living Earth Simulator. The LES represents a massive undertaking in computation, with the ultimate goal of modeling, with a generous margin for error, several simultaneous complex systems like the spread of disease, global highway traffic patterns, international financial transactions, weather patterns, telephone traffic, and more.

 "Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."-Dr. Dirk Helbing, Chairman of FuturlCT (AKA the Living Earth Simulator)


Although the project may be years from producing robust and useful data, Dr. Helbing and his team have acquired funding to construct a supercomputer array that will accept real-time complex data input from financial markets, medical records, Planetary Skin, social networks, news agencies, and the USGS, and analyze and predict the emerging and organic trends generated by the complex matrix of global Human society. Helbing hopes the project will act as a 'information collider' drawing upon the exponential pool of data our information technology generates, and searching for significant patterns in seemingly distinct systems.

Only the technological constraints of the year 2011 prevent the Living Earth Simulator from modeling exclusively the large scale effects of Human Behavior on the environment. As our technological capacities progress, projects like the LES will begin to model the more subtle and complex motivations that generate patterns of commerce and communication by modeling the interconnected behaviors of individual humans. Eventually such simulations will involve the creation of sentient beings, Homo Amplio, who have authentic and emotional human experiences as part of the simulacrum.

Modeling the planet earth may be a far cry from modeling all possible particle histories in the observable universe,  but creating accurate models of earth must eventually include creating accurate models of the sentient beings living on it. Perhaps these Homo Amplio, created in a statistical research simulation, would be 'alive' for hours or days on this Earth, but because binary computing will be able to vastly outpace the electro-chemical machine of the brain in terms of operations per second, the created Homo Amplio might experience full authentic and human lives, perceiving their subjective flow of time precisely as we do ours. The ethical implications of creating Human lives for the purposes of a science project however, represents an issue Homo Sapiens will have to consider carefully as projects like the LES proliferate, and the hardware required to replicate or surpass(in terms of information and accuracy) the LES becomes more accessible.

 It is conceivable that a garage in 2111 will be capable of holding a computer capable of simulating billions of Homo Sapiens-like Human lives at the whims any Human with the resources and interest to do such a thing. Yikes!

More At BBC, and DailyTech

On the Origin of Species (Part 1)

"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. "

-Albert Camus

You and I are examples of Humanity. Taxonomically classified as Animalia Chordata Mammalia Primates Hominidae Homo Sapiens Sapiens, modern anthropology believes we reached our modern anatomical norms approximately 200,000 years before the Common Era somewhere near the east coast of Africa. Our emergence was not the first time robust intelligence had walked the surface of the earth. In fact at the dawn of Sapiens, rival hominid species occupied nearly all other continents, the human family was extraordinarily large, accommodating a variety of sentient, tool-using apes.

As Homo Sapiens left Africa, we set about subverting the dominion of other apes and large mammals becoming the primary predator in all of the biomes we reached by 50,000BCE. In Europe, aside predatory cats and bears, we competed with our closest biological cousin Homo Neanderthal for supremacy of the food chain north of the Mediterranean Sea. The Neanderthal branch of humanity had endured and prospered for perhaps 600,000 years, crumbled in the face of Homo Sapiens' occupation of Europe, and 170,000 years after we emerged in Africa, the last Neanderthal perished in Europe. Details of this period of co-habitation are lost in antiquity, but it is likely that it included violent conflict, linguistic exchange and perhaps even spiritual and mythic interchange. Our species tho, did interbreed with Neanderthal, and incorporated some of their genetic distinctiveness into the species Homo Sapiens. Long hypothesized, geneticists confirmed this Gene Flow Event in 2010. Sapiens' sexual relationship with Neanderthal likely lasted several centuries, but a distinct population of Neanderthal survived until 30,000 years BCE. Because of our anatomical similarities, and ability to easily interbreed some scientists believe that Neanderthal should be reclassified as a subspecies of humanity. However I believe that by acknowledging Neanderthal as a separate human species, distinct but co-extant, and perhaps co-equal, we can establish a valuable precedent. Under these circumstances, the Human Experience becomes the domain of a multiplicity of forms. As we move toward a future in which we coexist with a variety of augmented biological humans and artificial human intelligences, interpreting our past evolution in this way allows us to acknowledge the fluidity of humanity across many levels of abilities and intelligences.

"Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? "

-Hal, 2001

Homo Neanderthal is perhaps the best known of our early Hominid competitors. But we know that there were others: The Hobbit, Homo Floresiensis, was famously discovered in 2004, and many off-shoots of Homo Erectus that emerged throughout Eurasia and Oceania. In Part 2 of the series On the Origin of Species I'll explore a second Gene Flow Event documented in this month's Nature and discuss why the lack of diversity in the modern human genome lends itself to speciation, not sub-speciation.

Warning: Obama's FCC Prepares to Dismantle the Internet

Events in Washington D.C. over the next several hours stand to have a profound effect on the Internet as we know it. The Federal Communications Commission proposed allowing internet service providers to discriminate content. The effects of such a policy could be disastrous, akin to the defacement of a Modern Wonder of the World.

Please educate yourselves, and call on your representatives in Washington, and to call on the President himself, to stand firmly with advocates of open communication, access, and connection. Visit this site for an introduction to the concept of net neutrality, and the stakes of the FCC's position. Please visit Save the Internet and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to see what you can do to get involved and help preserve the open and organic nature of the internet.

Der Welt

Do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show you it in my mirror? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a fixed, iron quantity of force which grows neither larger nor smaller, which doesn’t exhaust but only transforms itself, as a whole unchanging in size, an economy without expenditure or losses, but equally without increase, without income, enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary, not something blurred, squandered, not something infinitely extended; instead, as a determinate force set into a determinate space, and not into a space that is ‘empty’ but as force everywhere, as a play of forces and forces – waves simultaneously one and ‘many’, accumulating here while diminishing there, an ocean of forces storming and flooding within themselves, eternally changing, eternally rushing back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms, shooting out from the simplest into the most multifarious, from the stillest, coldest, most rigid into the most fiery, wild, self-contradictory, and then coming home from abundance to simplicity, from the play of contradiction back to the pleasure of harmony, affirming itself even in this sameness of it’s courses and years, blessing itself as what must eternally return, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no surfeit, no fatigue – this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery of dual delights, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, unless there is a goal in the happiness of a circle, without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself – and do you want a name for this world? A solution to all its riddles? A light for you too, for you, the most secret, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly? – This world is the will to power – and nothing besides!And you yourselves too are also this will to power – and nothing besides!-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche July 1885


Source

"The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster." - Adam Smith

Within 30 years, Homo Sapiens' capacities will include the production of automata that possess intelligence far beyond our own and abilities to interact with and detect their environment that by biological standards represent an evolutionary leap akin to that from an insect to a contemporary human. Fear not though, in the 1700's Adam Smith's dire predictions were made when robots existed outside of ourselves. The coming revolution in the fields of nanotechnology, and its myriad medical applications will see our biological needs tended to by machines on a cellular level. Complex circuits of molecular design will augment our biological neurons allowing for faster data processing, better data storage, and most intriguing and compelling of all, the ability to back up and copy the data which comprises our conscious selves. Artificial spheres in our bloodstream will outperform our erythrocytes by multiple factors of 10, allowing you to hold your breath for hours on end. Artificial photovoltaic circuits will embed in our retina extending our visual spectrum beyond the limits of our beloved ROYGBIV. Humanity will transform alongside our automata, and may indeed become indistinguishable from our 'artificial' brethren.

In 2060 conscious entities of entirely artificial construction will exist alongside technologically augmented humans and those humans who have chosen to remain completely biological. (Although some sort of technological immune system may become necessary for biological entities once the variety of artificial nano-machines reaches a certain level of atmospheric saturation.) We need not fear robacalypse. Homo Amplio will accommodate a remarkable variety of forms and abilities, and sentient robots will see themselves as and will be perceived as part of the Human species.

Emily Howell

“Why not develop music in ways unknown? This only makes sense. I cannot understand the difference between my notes on paper and other notes on paper. If beauty is present, it is present. I hope I can continue to create notes and that these notes will have beauty for some others. I am not sad. I am not happy. I am Emily. You are Dave. Life and un-life exist. We coexist. I do not see problems.” —Emily Howell

Emily Howell is an artificial construct programed to process linguistic input, compose music, accept and understand criticism, and revise her tunes accordingly. Is she alive? No. But is she sliding down an uncanny valley of intelligence? Yes indeed. And sliding beautifully.


More on Emily.