Question Technology

Singularity Summit Recordings

Pictures and audio from the event are now up at the summit's website: Singularity Summit Coverage.

Previously: Thoughts on the Singularity Summit.

Honoring Jane Jacobs?

I've noticed that many blogs have commented on the recent death of Jane Jacobs, whose work obviously affected many people, myself included, though I haven't read all of her books.  The latest is a tribute from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology of all places.  After a few sentences describing how an economic theory of hers has some relationship to their nanotech manufacturing ideas, it continues:

Despite her age—nearly 90—we have to wonder whether advanced nanomedicine could have saved her life and given the world many more years of her keen and valuable insights.

Link: Nanotechnology: Latest C-R-Newsletter.

The sentiment is genuine, I'm sure, but this comes across as a very base sort of way to argue for your technology.  Imagine a big pharmaceutical company writing: it's sad that such-and-such celebrity just died; we have to wonder if our new drug might have saved her life, if only the FDA would hurry up and approve it.

Furthermore, I have to wonder if the author of Dark Age Ahead, a book that raised deep questions about the trajectory of our culture and technology, would appreciate being associated with this agenda.

Post-Singularity Fun and Games

Clive Thompson writes on his blog about "Plasma Pong: A game of pong played in a plasma field."  This reminds me of a short story by Greg Egan in a sci-fi collection called Beyond Singularity.  I bought that book recently to try to learn more about this whole singularity thing from the sci-fi enthusiast point of view.  Most of the stories are optimistic, and purport to tell us how humans might live in the distant future when they're immortal and no longer constrained to physical bodies.

In Egan's story, "Border Guards," multi-million-year-olds play a game called "quantum soccer," in which they run around and try to score points by manipulating electrical fields.  I imagine it would look something like plasma pong.  When they're not playing pong, they obsess over relationships like sulky teenagers until a day comes when they've had enough and they simply disappear to another place in the universe to start over.

I've only read about half the stories in this book, but based on this and various other readings from books and from poking around the Singularity Summit's website, I have to wonder: is this the best we can come up with?  We would change our species to be adolescent video gamers forever?  Other utopian visions don't seem much more compelling.

I'm probably being a unfair to Egan's story -- I'm sure it and the others have merits that I'm not appreciating -- but where are the really compelling stories about why we're doing this?

(My wife recommends Charles Stross's novels, and I plan to check them out too.)

Technology Risks

The NY Times has an interesting article today about technology risks, in particular nuclear, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.  Link: Technology's Future: A Look at the Dark Side - New York Times.

FDA urged to limit nanoparticle use in cosmetics and sunscreens

From today's SF Chronicle:

Numerous products such as sunscreens and cosmetics contain potentially hazardous nanoparticles but lack adequate warning labels of their possible health effects, two activist groups charged Tuesday.

The groups -- Friends of the Earth and International Center for Technology Assessment -- formally petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, demanding that the agency better monitor and regulate products containing nanoparticles -- and said they would sue if the agency does nothing.

Their announcement coincided with the release of a report by the groups that highlighted the number of personal care products with nanoingredients, material typically 100 nanometers wide -- far smaller than a red blood cell -- or smaller.

Tuesday's filing was "the first-ever legal challenge on the potential human health and environmental risks of nanotechnology and nanomaterials," the groups claimed in a statement.

Link: FDA urged to limit nanoparticle use in cosmetics and sunscreens.

Websites: Friends of the Earth, International Center for Technology Assessment.

Thoughts on the Singularity Summit

The Singularity Summit at Stanford took place yesterday.  Here's a quick rundown of the event and some impressions from my notes.  The singularity is described as that point in the future (2029 according to Raymond Kurzweil) where artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence.  The term is borrowed, somewhat imprecisely, from physics and math.  Gravitational pull reaches a singularity at a black hole, for example.

Ray Kurzweil opened with his keynote, laying out his arguments for his "Law of Accelerating Returns."  He says you can fit an exponential curve to virtually any history of events in information technology.  Detractors have said that it's not an exponential curve, it's a logistic S-curve.  They're wrong, says Kurzweil, because he's only talking about IT -- this isn't rabbits and foxes.  "Yes there are limits, but they're not very limiting."  Kurzweil believes that the mind is computational, and that we can "reverse engineer the brain."  Anticipating Bill McKibben's argument that we might come to a point of technology where we say "enough" because we've got what we need to live happily, Kurzweil says it won't be enough until we overcome all diseases, and, by the way, that includes death.

Douglas Hofstadter spoke next.  Hofstadter has been interested in this topic since the late 90's and organized this symposium's predecessor, The Spiritual Robots Symposium held at Stanford in 2000.  The inspiration were two recent books, Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Hans Moravec's Robot: Mere Machine To Trancend Mind.  Hofstadter hoped then to initiate serious scientific and philosophical consideration of these issues, and he feels that the 2000 symposium was a failure, as participants didn't engage the issues, but mostly just presented their own work.  He made a plea for the same today: "The scientific world is not taking this seriously."  He wants to see "serious skepticism."  He appreciates and studies the work of Kurzweil and others, but has trouble taking them seriously, in part because they're "marred by too much science fiction."  He reaches a point where he has to ask, "how secure can I be of the sanity of this person?"  In Kurzweil's case, there's the startling fact that Kurzweil does this work because he wants to live forever.  Hofstadter didn't name other names, but Vernor Vinge's original essay, and some of the other writings proposed as being seminal for this field, clearly lack scientific or philosophical rigor.  Not to dismiss sci-fi altogether, but singularity enthusiasts seem largely ignorant of other relevant fields -- those within science, which I think Hofstadter was getting at, and those outside of science, in particular philosophy of science and technology, history of technology, and science and technology studies.  Hofstadter made the technical point (as have others) that exponential curves don't have a knee, as Kurzweil claims.  And they don't reach a singularity either!  An exponential curve has the same shape regardless of scale.  Indeed, I would think that one hundred years ago, or at any time for that matter, people could have plotted various markers of progress on a graph, saw an exponential curve and said, whoo boy, it's getting really steep now!  Everything's going to change if it gets much higher!  Perhaps the singularity, in this sense, is just an illusion that's there for anyone who looks, whenever they look.

Back to Hofstadter's plea for serious scientific discussion of the questions at hand.  Did the new summit answer his request?  I don't think so.  The next several speakers were specialists in various tangential fields and most made little apparent effort to orient their talk toward this audience and topic.

Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute presented on his theories of risk, in particular what he calls "existential risk."  Sebastian Thrun of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab gave an entertaining presentation about the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenge, which his team won this year.  Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing evangelized against digital rights management.  Eric Drexler of Nanorex evangelized on nanotechnology.  "Bogus criticism has fallen out of fashion," he said, then disappeared for the rest of the day.  I guess Dr. Drexler doesn't take questions.  Max More of the Extropy Institute talked about something or other, futuristically.  Christine Peterson of the Foresight Nanotechnology Institute told us more about nanotech.

Things got back on track somewhat with an on-topic talk by John Smart of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, who started with a joke about the preceding speakers' bad powerpoint: "I have 90 slides" for 20 minutes.  Only it wasn't a joke.  He raced through a survey of a history of acceleration studies (somewhat like this paper of his).  It's useful work, presumably, been there's not enough depth, and I think his scope is too narrow.  Smart often states that it takes "courage" to pursue singularity or acceleration studies.  To me, this doesn't help his cause; it just highlights the fact that many of these folks are believers looking for pseudo-scientific support.

Eliezer Yudkowsky of The Singularity Institute spoke about his "Friendly AI" research and the coming "intelligence explosion" caused by recursive AI -- AI that can reprogram itself.  He makes the point that we're not smart enough to predict what humans will do, so how can we hope to predict what smarter AIs will do?  He has no solution, only that it's "very very very difficult."  And he's working on it, I guess.  Yudkowsky is undoubtedly very talented in his field, but again the breadth of his approach seems weak.  There's much ad hoc amateur philosophizing, as opposed to serious engagement with professional philosophy.  Some of Yudkowsky's statements also typify the scientistic and patronizing attitude of many singularity enthusiasts.  They're in charge now, and everyone needs to get on board.  Far be it from them to do their homework.  One of Yudkowsky's concluding slides said "Someday the human species has to grow up. Why not sooner rather than later?"  But grow up according to whom?  Many wise people throughout history -- philosophers, scientists, religious thinkers -- have studied the problem of how  do we grow up and transcend our human limits and achieve meaning.  Some would say they've succeeded, or at least advanced the study quite a long way.  Why should we take seriously a bunch of blinkered computer scientists and physicists who dismiss this history altogether?

The final speaker was Bill McKibben, who spoke eloquently about human meaning, hyper-individualism vs. ecology and community, and other large issues regarding the singularity and posthumanism.  What are the practical applications of this work, he asked.  I won't go into summarizing his points as they're largely an extension of his book, Enough, and I'm in pretty much full agreement with them.  His critique wouldn't satisfy Hofstadter, I suspect, as it comes from the ecological and humanities side of things.  I don't think that detracts from McKibben's arguments; it's just that there's room for criticism from many other directions as well.

Next up was a bit of panel discussion and then questions from the audience.  I skipped out of these because of a splitting headache and a desire to visit the Stanford bookstore.  Audio files of the event are supposed to appear on the site within a few days, and I plan to listen to the remainder in case I missed any interesting Q&A.

Singularity or (and?) bust

I'll be going to the Singularity Summit tomorrow and will hopefully have something interesting to say about it here afterwards.  Unlike others, I won't be "blogging it live," because nobody deserves to be exposed to my raw thinking in real time (ask my wife).  Plus I don't own a laptop.

The summit's website has links to much interesting background reading (which is all over the map in terms of quality, I must say).

Here's a local news article about the summit, from today's San Francisco Chronicle: Smarter than thou? Stanford conference ponders a brave new world with machines more powerful than their creators.

Singularity and Human Enhancement Events

Here are a couple of upcoming events that might interest you if you're in the Bay area and want to see lots of big name futurist types do their thing.

The Singularity Summit at Stanford, May 13, is "a rare gathering of thinkers to explore the rising impact of science and technology on society. The summit has been organized to further the understanding of a controversial idea – the singularity scenario."  Features Eric Drexler, Ray Kurzweil, Bill McKibben and many others.

The Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference is May 26-28, at Stanford Law School.  Speakers include James Hughes, Aubrey de Grey and others.

I'll be attending the Singularity Summit and will report on it here.  I'm not sure yet if I'll go to the Human Enhancement conference.

[Updated 4/30/06]

Update on Technology Review's Aubrey de Grey Challenge

Apparently Technology Review's debate on the merits of Aubrey de Grey's ideas (or his 'science', if you wish) is set to heat up again.  Last year, after publishing a critical profile of de Grey in the magazine and taking much heat for it, they sought to back it up with more authority by soliciting a response from a working biogerontologist.  Recall that de Grey is the guy with the ambitious program to cure all diseases, including aging (if you call it a disease, which he basically does), so that eventually people will live forever.  Only it turned out the real scientists were too busy to respond (or they don't have a response), so the next step was to offer a reward ($20K), which is where we're at now.  From their web site:

In July 2005, Technology Review announced a prize for any molecular biologist working in the field of aging who could successfully meet the following challenge: demonstrate that SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), Aubrey de Grey's prescription for defeating aging, is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate. We pledged to pay $10,000 to the authors of a winning submission. Not to be upstaged, The Methuselah Foundation, an organization founded by de Grey and devoted to promoting anti-aging science, pledged an additional $10,000 to anyone who meets the requirements of the challenge.

We also pledged to form an independent panel to judge the submissions, and there we had some difficulty. The prize has languished, not for a shortage of submissions, but because we wanted to assemble a suitably distinguished group of judges.

Link: The SENS Challenge: Update - Technology Review.

The criteria of "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate" seems a bit stricter than the original phrasing.  There are cases where results or methods are wrong, yet still worthy of debate, I think... but I'm probably parsing that wrong.  The article goes on to list judges.  Presumably there will be more about the entries soon.

Previous posts about Aubrey de Grey: search.

Following the Money (Or Not) - Sniffing Out Corporate PR

If you go to Google and type in the name of a well-known speaker on environmental or consumer issues (say, Jeremy Rifkin or Andrew Kimbrell), chances are that some of your top hits will take you to sites like Activist Cash, which describes itself as follows:

At ActivistCash.com, we follow the money -- for you.

This site, a part of the ConsumerFreedom.com network, is committed to providing detailed and up-to-date information about the funding source of radical anti-consumer organizations and activists. We have analyzed over 410,000 pages of IRS documents to create this database, and new information will be added every month.

The organizations we track on this site are tax-exempt nonprofits. That means you have the right to know what they're up to. The same rule applies to the tax-exempt foundations that pay their bills.

As you read through the site, you may be surprised by some of the connections between these groups and individuals, forming a web of anti-consumer activism -- promoting false science, scare campaigns, inflated public health causes, and sometimes even violent anti-consumer "direct actions."

Well now, you might think -- this sounds informative!  Of course I want to know what all those dastardly tax-skirting nonprofits are up to and where they get all their money!

By now, though, you should smell something a little fishy, unless you happen to be especially gullible (perhaps you're a young student assigned to do some interweb research, an impatient blogger looking for tidbits for your manifesto, or just a run-of-the-mill Fox News viewer).

A key observation is that Activist Cash doesn't tell you where they get their money.  (Nor does their parent site, The Center for Consumer Freedom, or their myriad sister sites about animal rights activists, such as PhysicianScam.com and PetaKillsAnimals.com.)

Activist Cash is nothing but a front group for industry.  According to SourceWatch.org,

ActivistCash is one of several front groups created by Berman & Co., a public affairs firm owned by lobbyist Rick Berman. Based in Washington, DC, Berman & Co. represents the tobacco industry as well as hotels, beer distributors, taverns, and restaurant chains.

In a 1999 interview with the Chain Leader, a trade publication for restaurant chains, Berman boasted that he attacks activists more aggressively than other lobbyists. "We always have a knife in our teeth," he said. Since activists "drive consumer behavior on meat, alcohol, fat, sugar, tobacco and caffeine," his strategy is "to shoot the messenger. ... We've got to attack their credibility as spokespersons."

ActivistCash.com was established for precisely this purpose. It attempts to discredit activists by suggesting that there is something disreputable about the money they have received from foundations.

Why should you believe SourceWatch?  They tell you who funds them, and they're not funded by corporations.  In their words:

Welcome to SourceWatch, a collaborative project of the Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org) to produce a directory of the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda. SourceWatch's primary focus is on documenting public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests. Over time, SourceWatch has broadened to include others involved in public debates including media outlets, journalists and government agencies. Unlike some other wikis, SourceWatch has a policy of strict referencing, and is overseen by a paid editor.

Of course SourceWatch isn't perfect.  People make mistakes and I'm sure the odd one slips through.  Above all you should decide for yourself who to believe.  (As an exercise you can follow the loop -- look up the Center for Media and Democracy on ActivistCash, then read CMD's analysis of that article, and so on.)

Cynical people will dismiss this as just being the same game played on both sides -- you can't trust anyone anymore, right?  But that's not true, and that's one of the goals of PR groups like ActivistCash -- to confuse you.  And they do an amazingly successful job of it.  This is a pretty transparent example, but think about it next time you read an op-ed expressing any particular opinion (what prompted this person to write it?) or visit a website or hear a speaker from some group with a pleasant name like "The Center for Responsible X" or "Ethical Y".  Nine times out of ten they're not the objective, unbiased people they want you to think.

For more details on ActivistCash, see also "A visit to the ActivistCash.com website."

Nanobabble

Today Salon has what appears to be a promising article about the risks of nanotechnology:

Scientists are on the verge of breaking the carbon barrier -- creating artificial life and changing forever what it means to be human. And we're not ready.

Unfortunately, that's the most readable part of it.  I didn't have the patience to go past the first two paragraphs of opaque sci-fi/pomo/futurist babble.  Perhaps you'll have better luck.  (Though judging from the comments I'm not alone.)

Of course, there's not much else out there in the way of critical takes on nanotechnology to recommend.  You could read Bill McKibben's Enough if you haven't yet done so.

Link: Salon.com Technology | I, Nanobot.

Update: Accelerating Future has some good comments on the article.  More from Technorati.

The Loka Institute

I recently learned (from the excellent book Trust Us, We're Experts by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber) about the Loka Institute:

The Loka Institute (TLI), a national 501 (c) 3 non-profit research, advocacy, and training institute, has been in operation for more than a decade:

    * Highlighting the social and political repercussions of science & technology and development
    * Providing processes, protocols and best practices for democratic decision-making in organizations, community projects, and policy-making
    * Promoting and practicing participatory research
    * Advocating appropriate design of technology to reflect democratic concerns

We partner with community based organizations, local, state and federal government agencies, and universities.

They promote many worthwhile activities, such as community-based (and funded) "science shops" that enable community groups to study controversial issues themselves.

The New Atlantis

There's a new issue out of the on-line journal The New Atlantis, with commentary on the $100 Laptop among other things.  An excerpt:

[The] blinkered enthusiasm of Negroponte and many others for “salvation by laptop” is the latest symptom of a delusion that afflicts millions: thinking that technology, and computing technology in particular, is the thing most needed to change the world for the better. Some skeptics have questioned the feasibility of the $100 price or criticized some of the technical details. But only a few lonely voices have raised more fundamental questions about how the machines will be used—such as this letter to M.I.T.’s Technology Review: “I’m Mexican, and I’ve seen which sites Mexican kids surf in cybercafés—and it’s not ones like Project Gutenberg.”

Yet rather than asking hard questions about unyielding poverty in an affluent world, it is far easier to praise “The Laptop That Will Save the World” (as the New York Times has called it) and to lionize Negroponte as a visionary (as ABC News has done). It is much more fun to speak of “integrated and seamless” educational experiences and “access to all the libraries of the world.” And it is nice to believe that one’s own favorite pastimes—like technological innovation—are what the most needy people most need.

Human Enhancement Discussion at WorldChanging

WorldChanging.com has a good discussion with James Hughes, Ramez Naam, and Joel Garreau about the future of technologies for "enhancing humans."  It's quite long, but well worth your time to read.

Link: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Human Changing.

Better Human Betterment

That blonde haired, blue eyed girl is beckoning you to the new website for BetterHumans, an organization promoting the ethically questionable "transhumanist" agendas of thinkers like Aubrey de Grey, James Hughes, Ray Kurzweil, and Ramez Naam, who want to produce a better species through radical genetic engineering and other technologies.

Of course, don't confuse them with the Human Betterment Foundation, one of the American eugenic organizations in the early 1900s that promoted race enhancement through forced sterilization of "defectives" and other means, and provided much inspiration for Hitler.