With all the talk about the future lately, I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to predict. Laura’s dad liked the book The Black Swan, which is about extremely improbable events having the greatest impact on our world. The author argues that since these highly unlikely events change the world so much, there is no sense in trying to predict the future other than for comfort and entertainment. That may be true, but there’s one group of people that depends on their ability to predict the future: bookies.

I’m not terribly interested in the the odds of the Dodgers going to the World Series, but I am interested in who is likely to be the next president of the United States. Slate had an article on this not too long ago and according to the odds they looked at, Ms. Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.

NewBodog.com is one site that mainly deals in sports wagering, but also has a section for high profile US politics. According to them, Stephen Colbert has an 800/1 chance of becoming the next president.

InTrade.com has even more interesting odds. They frame their business as “Predictions Markets” rather than betting, but you can still find some interesting predictions. You can buy shares in various markets such as, the US launching an air strike against Iran before certain dates, when Katie Couric will leave the CBS Evening News, and even the weather. They have handy little graphs to see the popularity of these predictions over time. Interesting stuff.

These kinds of markets combine the “wisdom of crowds” idea with actual money, so I would think, the results would be pretty good. Then again who knows? The opinion polling site OpinionRepublic.com has Hillary slated as the next president. However, their users have also voted for Stomp the Yard as the second Best Movie of All Time, second only to Titanic. Maybe some crowds are wiser than others.

Another great day at the Summit. I think I have enough new ideas swimming in my head to blog about for a year, although I don’t want to turn this into an all-Singularity-all-the-time sort of thing. I’d like to give my overall impressions of the summit here and let the rest sink in a bit more before I try to post my own ideas on the Singularity. Please keep in mind that this summit was pretty much my crash course in all things AI.

To me, the biggest issues that were raised at the summit were:

1) The Singularity as the future of all human progress.

2) The societal reactions to the coming Singularity and technological advancement in general.

3) Moral/ethical questions involved in the creation of sentient beings.

During the conference many fields were discussed: biology, physics, nanotech, philosophy, finance etc. Essentially, all fields of study, all of human progress is leading up to the Singularity. Think of it this way: the Walkman was a predecessor of the iPod, the record player was a predecessor of the Walkman, the phonograph was a predecessor of the record player. All technology will be the precursor to the Singularity. From the first stone tool, technology began to diversify. Soon we had the wheel, agriculture, medicine, etc. In recent years I believe we have seen a shift from a divergence of specialized technologies, to a convergence of those parts into greater, cumulative technologies. Laser eye surgery is a great example of seemingly different fields, combining to great success. The Singularity will be the ultimate convergence of human progress.

That is, if we ever get there. The cultural and political hurdles to the Singularity are enormous. People fear new technology, especially technologies that could be potentially dangerous. With the uproars over genetically modified food, it’s hard to imagine that people will be ready to accept something like mind uploading. Even more distressing is government’s tendency to hijack or crush new advancements. One thing I found disturbing was how much of AI and robotic research is funded by the military. Do we really want to create super-intelligent killing machines? In my mind, the greatest obstacle we face as a species is overcoming governmental and cultural pressures that hold back or corrupt innovation.

Finally, there are the moral/ethical issues surrounding the creation of super-intelligent AI’s. There was a lot of speculation as to how we could instill some sort of conscience into machines that will be vastly more intelligent than we are. Even if we are able to give them some sort of morality, whose morality will it be? Eliezer Yudkowsy suggested today that as our morals are constantly evolving (think about race relations in America over the last 200 years), we should somehow give the AI’s that trajectory of moral growth, rather than a fixed set of rules that we think of as “good” today. I thought this was a very interesting idea. Beyond creating moral AI’s, there is the question of our own behavior towards AI’s. There was a lot of disagreement on this point at the conference. Ideas ranged from programming the AI’s to be happy as our slaves to treating them just like a human. Interesting stuff.

Overall, I would say that the Singularity is very exciting and very promising. The conference really motivated me to keep learning more about this, which I hope to share with you.

Here are some links to speakers and subjects that I found particularly interesting:

SENS

Accelarating Studies Foundation

Steve Jurvetson

Christine Peterson of the Foresight Nanotech Institute

And in conclusion, a great quote from Archimedes (I’m not sure whose presentation it was in, apologies.):

Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.

We just got back from the Singularity Summit and our heads are about to explode from learning so much in one day. We’ll need a couple days to process everything to be able to write an intelligent post, but in the meantime we wanted to give you some links to our favorite speakers. Enjoy!

Speakers:

Rodney Brooks - MIT

Wendall Wallach - Yale

Ben Goertzel

More tomorrow!

Tomorrow we’re off to the Singularity Summit. Since first learning about the Singularity, we’ve been talking about AI, alien life, nanotech, reality as a simulations and all sorts of interesting futuristic topics. In researching these topics, I’ve found that everyone seems to have their pet version of the future. At the Summit tomorrow, I’m sure we will be thoroughly convinced that AI will be most important issue facing humanity in the future. Now, I think futurism is a lot of fun and very useful in understanding our universe, but no matter how much we plan and speculate, we can never predict the future exactly.

Jorge Luis Borges has a great story about this called “The Secret Miracle”. The story is about a man who has been sentenced to death by firing squad. During the night before his execution, he realizes that the future never unfolds as you imagine it will. He spends the hours leading to his execution trying to imagine every possible way he would be killed in the morning, believing that if he can think of a scenario, that scenario will not occur. I won’t give away the ending, but it’s a very interesting concept.

Think about your own life. If you’re like me, you probably couldn’t have predicted your present situation two years ago, even two months ago. Really we can’t even predict the next day most of the time. So, if we were to assume that all of the wildly differing theories of futurism are wrong, what might we end up with?

Futurism is fun because there are always new surprises around the corner. Will we be destroyed by global warming or wayward nanotech? Will the second coming of Christ save us or a super intelligent AI? Probably none of the above. The future is so exciting, we can’t even imagine it.

Note: I wrote this post on Thursday. On Friday Eliezer Yudkowsky had this similar post at Overcoming Bias. Coincidence? Maybe I’ll ask Eliezer at the Summit today.

Lately I have been thinking about aliens. The internet is full of alien info. I would like to share with you today my three favorite alien theories.

1 - Humans are descended from aliens.

Check out this Wikipedia article about Thiaoouba and see what I mean. This guy claims to have been abducted by aliens and taken to their planet for 9 days. During this time the aliens told him all about the progression of life forms as they move towards rejoining the Creator, how Jesus was an alien, and about alien toilets. These aliens also stressed spirituality and environmental stewardship as our path to progress.

2 - The US government has conspired to keep aliens a secret.

I’m pretty much convinced after hanging out at the Disclosure Project too long. They say that for the past 50 years or so the government has been covering up evidence of UFOs and alien landings. Ex-military, CIA, and other government officials testify that they were instructed to keep their experiences with the aliens a secret. The Disclosure Project also claims that the government has studied the alien ships and has much greater technology that we can even imagine.

3 - The Great Filter

The Great Silence refers to the paradox that while we think there should be other life out there in the universe, we have yet (?) to encounter it. This problem brings us to the Great Filter:

No alien civilizations have substantially colonized our solar system or systems nearby. Thus among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon reach. This one data point implies that a Great Filter stands between ordinary dead matter and advanced exploding lasting life. And the big question is: How far along this filter are we?

This quote comes from an essay by Robin Hanson who also writes for Overcoming Bias. The essay is long, but worth reading. It makes you wonder if we really could be unique in the universe, or maybe just the furthest along the path of space exploration.

So what does all this have to do with spirituality or personal growth? Well, the alien question is still unanswered. Whatever the answer turns out to be, it will have a huge impact on religion and the future of humanity. If that’s not good enough for you, look at it as a personal growth exercise. Learning and considering new possibilities is always good for you. It broadens your range of thought. If nothing else, this post will give you something to talk about to your conspiracy theorist uncle. Family bonding!

Yesterday’s post was prompted by something I read at a blog I had just discovered, Overcoming Bias. I read more and more of the blog and really gravitated towards the posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who wrote the post I referenced yesterday. So I started reading his stuff and learned all about the Singularity and found my way to a bunch of really interesting sites. It’s funny how one little discovery like that can send you all over cyberspace.

So now I am going to share with you what I’ve learned:

Eventually we will develop Artificial Intelligence or AI that is smarter than us. If an AI is smart enough to build another AI that is even smarter, it will be like an intelligence explosion going on and on with each generation of AI creating smarter and smarter AI’s. This intelligence explosion and the AI’s that would cause it are referred to as the Singularity. If these AI’s become hostile or even indifferent to human life, we will be in serious trouble.

Why will we be in trouble?

Think about the way we treat animals. We treat them like machinary to do work for us, we eat them, we use them as entertainment, etc. The primary reason this happens is that we are so much smarter than animals that we consider them a lower form of life. What would prevent super-intelligent AI’s from treating us similarly?

People who are into Singularity, like my new crush Eliezer Yudkowsky, think that it’s possible to create the first AI with a basic morality framework that would prevent it from harming us. He explains it much better than I would be able to in this video (also embedded below). Essentially, if you go along with this theory of the Singularity, this could be the greatest issue to face mankind. The AI’s would be smart enough to solve any problem we came across, provided we survived their existence.

This is pretty much the extent of my grasp on Singularity. I think it’s completely fascinating. In my diggings on the internet, I found out that there will be a Singularity Summit here in San Francisco in just a couple weeks! I hope to go and tell you all about it.

I used to be very skeptical of anything spiritual. One of the ideas that got me thinking and helped open my mind was that there are forces out in the universe that we can’t detect, either with our own five sense or with current technologies.

Think about a dolphin. Science tells us and we believe that dolphins use echolocation or high frequency clicks to navigate and determine the location of objects. You and I don’t have this ability. Likewise we can’t hear things a dog is able to hear, we don’t notice the television and radio signals floating around us all day, we simply aren’t equipped to sense certain phenomena. This leads me to believe there are probably lots of things going on out in the universe that we simply can’t sense, which brings me to dark matter.

Dark matter hasn’t been studied in depth, mainly because we haven’t been to observe it well. This article from Wired explains the hunt for dark matter and how close scientists are coming to finding it. Another essay explains that dark matter might make up over 90% of the universe. That would mean that not only are we unable to observe the vast majority of the universe, but that our world and everything in it could be just an anomaly in a universe of dark matter.

Dark matter is interesting because it proves that there are still new wonders to discover in the universe. When you are feeling skeptical about finding higher truths in this reality, think about dark matter, think about how dolphins navigate, think about other dimensions that could be intertwined with our own, just beyond our ability to see.

When you realize how much there is out there to be discovered, nothing seems impossible. Ghosts, fairies, aliens, time travel, who knows? Just because you can’t see it, just because science hasn’t named it yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

We’re nerds at heart. So when we read these articles from Cosmic Log and Slashdot about possible quantum tunneling, where particles move faster than the speed of light, we immediately thought of Star Trek: DS9. Although there’s a lot of controversy surrounding these experiments and no one seems to want to say Einstein was wrong, this could be a huge development in quantum physics and the way we see our universe.

Even a basic understanding of quantum physics can change how you view the universe. Try our Introduction to Quantum Physics as a starting point.

Yesterday I read an interesting article from the New York Times about reality. The author, John Tierney, seems convinced that the world we know may be nothing more than a computer simulation created by a super intelligent being or our own descendants in the future. As he put it, “it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.”

Tierney goes on to speculate on what behaviors would be most likely to ensure survival in a simulation. Maybe the most “interesting” people would survive longer to entertain the creator, maybe those who follow the simulation’s archetypal values would be rewarded. Maybe the simulation functions like a Star Trek holodeck, where the creator gets to join in the fun. Maybe it is a working model to study alternate histories by changing pivotal events. Maybe, maybe, on and on.

Although the idea of a computer generated world is interesting, this article was more useful in proving what we don’t know than giving any real insights. By suggesting yet another possible mode of reality, here a computer simulation which itself has endless possible orgins, Tierney proves that we still have no idea who we are or what our purpose is. We don’t even know the basic format of our universe.

Not only do we not know why we’re here or even where here is, we don’t know what we should be doing. If we are only characters in a child’s computer game, what is the best behavior to ensure survival? What is survival even worth if the finale is nothing more than “Game Over” as Tierney suggests?

The possibility that our world is a simulation only plants us more firmly at square one. What is the meaning of life and how can we best live it? After reading Tierney’s article, I am more convinced that the best way to live is the way that helps you be content and grow. Simulation or otherwise, we don’t know where we came from or where we are going. All we can do is make the best of where we are, which can take a lifetime to learn. If the game is unplugged tomorrow, would you be satisfied with your score?