Bionic Eyes and Strange Skies

The bionic eyes in the news reminded me of Dan Sylveste's (from Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds). Hopefully they won't have all the neat gadgets Sylveste built into them.

I wonder at what point technologies like this will offer benefits to those that use them over those that don't. Maybe in fifty years there will be people who choose to replace their natural retinas with artificial ones that can wirelessly communicate with any of the millions of microscopic cameras that will saturate our environment at that time.

Some of my favourite futuristic images from the olden-days have been put in the public domain! Whee! These are beautiful images. Donald Davis was commissioned to paint these by NASA in thr 1970s.

A Hydrogen Economy

One of the problems with the idea of a hydrogen economy as an alternative to an oil economy is that the comparison implies that hydrogen will take the place of oil. This is not true: most of the hydrogen on Earth is already oxidised and as such requires more energy to liberate than could be gleaned from hydrogen as a primary power source.

Putting aside nuclear fusion (not because it is totally unfeasible or anything, just that there is no guarantee of a workable solution soon enough to solve our impending global warming and peak oil difficulties, either from ITER or various other interested parties in aneutronic fusion).

But if you're talking about hydrogen as an alternative to gasoline in cars then hydrogen is a bit of a roundabout way of doing things. Hydrogen fuel cell cars would function in a similar way to electric cars. A report from Ulf Bossel (organiser of the European Fuel Cell Forum and general fuel-cell bod) last December points out some of the problems with hydrogen in this context. Another criticism of GWB's presidential initiative comes from Robert Zubrin's book The New Atlantis.

So far my favourite option for the automobile of the future is the ultra-capacitor. This way electricity from the mains (generated by nuclear power and space-based solar-power-beaming stations) could be used to "fuel" autos. The most compelling (i.e. the only one I've come across) of these schemes is EEStor Company of Cedar Park Texas. I think that right now we should concentrate on electric-petrol hybrids and then, depending on how soon ultra-capacitors can be made to work, gradually migrate to an electric-based transport paradigm (Eeew, sorry, but I just had to use paradigm - it's the RIGHT WORD damnit!).

Transport accounts for around 10 % of European carbon dioxide emissions. Removing our requirement for petroleum to fuel cars would be a big step in the right direction, even if it only means the problem of energy production is elsewhere.

Science and Technology #3

In The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, the author comments that you can classify civilizations in terms of how much energy they command. This is a similar idea to the Kardashev Scale, albeit somewhat scaled down.

We have been very fortunate as a civilisation so far in that our energy is relatively easy to extract, oil is an extraordinary useful commodity, and can be used for many things other than energy production. I was recently told about this scheme of carbon capture and storage, in which carbon dioxide is removed from the plant when the fossil fuel is burnt and piped back to the oil well. The gas is pumped underground and helps free up the 30 % of oil that is uneconomical to extract otherwise. The elegance of the system is very appealing.

Another interesting piece of scitech news is this story about Einstein Bose Condensates.

This slowly-moving clump was composed entirely of sodium atoms, effectively turning light into matter.

This is a fascinating prospect. Who knows what practical applications could be found for Einstein Bose Condensates?

In case you're still feeling blasé about the progress being made in various fields of human endeavour: consider this article exploring all the things we don't already know from Wired Magazine.

The Age of Information

It is an interesting irony that we who live in "the information age" can only ever hope to read a tiny fraction of all the information that is available to us.

Two hundred years ago a reasonably well-educated and well-off individual could expect to be able to read a significant fraction of all that had ever been written. Today the sheer volume of data that is pouring into humanity's collective knowledge-base means that most (in fact, all) of us can never know all there is to know.

But what if we didn't even aspire to the lofty goal of omniscience? What if we just wanted to be reasonably well-informed about events in a number of spheres that are of interest to us? From this point of view I feel both guilty and spoilt. I have neither the time nor the inclination to read kilobytes of text every day, by necessity I have to rely on many of the same crutches, composites and digests as everyone else.

I usually manage to read about two full-newspapers every week. These are usually The Guardian, The Independent, or The Times (and occasionally the business section of The Daily Telegraph). Call that forty articles a week of an average of one thousand words each. Forty thousand words! Additionally to this I browse Boing Boing, Slate, AlterNet, CybDem, Charles Stross' blog, Sp!ked and any interesting articles I find linked to these.

I think I read about eighty thousand words of new text (that which I haven't read before) every week, and this is just to keep up with the news.

One of the long term goals of transhumanism should be to develop an interface between our minds and external events. We already have one of these, of course, but a a human sensorium is limited to what it has evolved specifically to accomplish: survival.

In order to flourish in a posthuman world we will have to find a way of conveying large quantities of information in a meaningful way without damaging or irritating ourselves.

I love graphs. I love diagrams. A picture is said to speak a thousand words, and I found my understanding of linear maths was greatly enhanced once I'd worked out the relationship between the graphs and the functions.

More than graphs, I love new ways of understanding something. An insight into political thought can be found at the Political Compass, for interesting ways of viewing data look at this site and this site. One displays a variety of information displays, the other shows the network of relationships between philosophers on Wikipedia.

An interesting recent development in this area is this fascinating project, where the essential characteristics of things like golf-club swings or running-styles, things that are difficult to express in words or diagrams, are rendered into sound. From www.sfgate.com:

" Using a complex formula that involved hooking professional golfers up to sensors, Berger set to vowel sounds -- ah, eh and oo -- the velocity of the club head and the relative rotation of the shoulders with respect to the hips. Amateur golfers, attached to a computer, can get instant auditory feedback on their swings with vowel sounds and can make adjustments until it "sounds just right." "

This reminds me of the control-system of a spacecraft in Shismatrix by Bruce Sterling, where the internal sensory grid of the spacecraft is attached to a music synthesiser. The crew become so attuned to the natural rhythm of the ship that they can immediately tell when something is wrong.

The downsides to modern communications technology are well thrashed out - particularly in this old article about the perils of not-quite-getting-the-whole-transhumanism thing.

The kind of technique being implemented by Professor Berger has enormous potential for education. I imagine there will be tremendous developments in the future as we discover the precise relationships between our brains and how we learn. We will be able to alter our educational methods to suit individuals, so everyone will be able to learn more easily.

Personal-zeitgeist Cloud

In order that readers might comprehend more thouroughly where I float in the vast sea of ideas that is early twenty-first century culture I am going to write a long list of keywords that concern things that are of intellectual interest to me. Go.

Kardshev scale , Globus Cassus, Bernal sphere, O'Neill cylinder, Stanford torus, Bishop ring, transhumanism, oil age, Dyson swarm, agalmics, Moravec bush robot, ultra capacitor, Volantor, upload, technological singularity, star wisp, electric car, bodily augmentation, quantum computing, genetic engineering, engineered negligible senescence, nanofactory, von Neumann machine, space elevator, universal Turing machine, the brain, nuclear fission, utility fog, M2P2, laser launch, airship, nanosat, neural implant, peak oil, global warming, mesh network, HUD contacts, asteroid mining, fusion power, chemical engineering, AI, smart drugs, molecular nanotechnology, Matrioshka brain, exocortex, Lagrangian point.

State of Mind

One of the reasons I write this is so that my infamy may live on longer than my frail, squidgy, human body. Seeing things like this (a remarkable way of displaying connections between great thinkers) and Noah’s face over six years project leads me to suspect that 1) there is a great deal I have to learn and 2) not much time to do it in. Sixty years sounds like a long time, and that’s all I can reasonably expect. I guess I might even live to see humanity ascend to a Kardashev type 1 civilization, or maybe even Kardashev scale 2. I was reassured to hear on today’s The Material World that if the potential iron wealth of the asteroid belt would, if distributed evenly amongst the people of Earth, would result in around $100 billion/person. This is reassuring because a gentleman called James Howard Kunstler has been making very persuasive arguments for a major alteration of our standard of living. Space is the answer, and space can only be achieved through concentrated technological advancement.

Geneology of Influence

Check out this amazing display of the interconnections between individuals in Wikipedia here. This is a beautiful way of exploring philosophical tradition.

Is Personal Wealth a Good Thing?

Here are a few things that have been on my mind for the past few days. At the moment I’m re-reading Learning the World by Ken MacLeod. It is superbly written, and assumes a degree of (admittedly fragile) civility in the (post-)humans of the future, in stark contrast to Stephen Baxter’s peculiarly pessimistic view of the future (Baxter disregards all possible human enhancement, and instead concentrates on natural human evolution, which has ceased to be a major factor in the future of humanity).

In the futuristic society MacLeod envisions in LtW humanity has spread out from the solar system and colonised several star systems. The method of colonisation involves launching vast generation ships (with indefinite longevity all of the original inhabitants survive to see the end of the trip. Once the ship arrives in a new system the youthful “ship generation” disassemble the asteroids, moons and minor planets and build a vast green sphere of space habitats around the new star. The original ship, divorced of its engines, turns into one of many habitats and the engines themselves are outfitted with raw materials, and become part of the first of many more ships to travel out to the next system to repeat the process.

Over the course of the journey, as more information about the destination system comes to light, there is much (monetary) speculation over the destinations system, with “resource futures” divvied up between members of the crew and passengers. MacLeod has explored the idea of an anarcho-capitalist society and the idea of an anarcho-socialist society in his previous (and excellent) Fall Revolution sequence.

All this has got me thinking about the nature of capitalism, the distribution of wealth, and the future of a posthuman humanity.

At the moment, in Britain and the USA there is a trend towards greater disparity in wealth, average incomes for the top 1% of the population in terms of wealth are increasing, whereas average incomes for the bottom 50% are remaining more or less static. Upper-middle-class people, who would be considered “well off” in another era now believe that they are “poorer” than they actually are. This is because of a combination of factors, including the greater visibility of the rich and their lavish lifestyles. This phenomenon is explored in depth in Stewart Lansley’s excellent book Rich Britain.

This book raises an interesting ethical question: is it fair (and is it just) that some can have so much and some can have so (comparatively) little?

From what I have absorbed on the subject there seem to be two broad schools of thought on the subject:

1. People who believe that enormous individual wealth is good. These people argue that individuals who possess great wealth have grown assets (e.g. property, land, a business), worked hard, taken risks and deserve their wealth. People who believe this argue that these wealthy individuals pay enormous amounts of tax money (more than other individuals on more modest incomes pay over a lifetime), and also create employment in their businesses and in the services and products they consume. This is an opinion shared by Winwood Reade (see elsewhere in this text).
2. People who believe that great personal wealth can only exist at the expense of other individuals. These people believe that the owners of capital are given too many advantages, way out of proportion to their actual contribution to society. People who believe this argue that the uber-rich can afford tax-havens and accountants who can hide their wealth and ensure that the uber-wealthy can pay as much, or as little, tax as they want.

My own opinions lie somewhere between these two extremes (although slightly closer to the first school of thought than the second – incidentally, check out The Political Compass for a much more rational description of how [relative] political views should be talked about, in contrast to the traditional left/right image), I believe that individuals should be given as many freedoms as possible, and that these freedoms should extend to things like access to top-quality education, healthcare and biological self-determination (see democratic transhumanism for what I mean by that last point).

I agree with Warren Buffett that inherited wealth is generally a bad thing (here engineered indefinite longevity would solve problems – if individuals never expect to die, they would have no desire to pass on their wealth to their offspring), but I believe the competitive and entrepreneurial spirit has done a great deal of good for humanity as a whole.

One of the more controversial aspects of the new breed of super wealthy has been highlighted by the recent record-high bonuses paid to bankers and financiers. I think that those who gain the most wealth should be the people who create the most wealth – the people for whom the platitudes of the first school of thought apply. I would probably include Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Howard Hughes (only because I have a soft spot for Howard Hughes – he was probably a most objectionable individual). In the process of making their fortunes, these individuals improved the lives of many other people, either through philanthropy (Philanthropist: a rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket – Ambrose Pierce The Devil’s Dictionary), or improvements in the standards of living brought about by their industrial actions.

However there are bankers and usurers who don’t so much create wealth as rearrange it, mostly so that it ends up in their pockets. I’m thinking of Carl Icahn, Mike Milken, and Phillip Green amongst others.

This trend of the rich getting richer and the middle-incomers staying the same without any detectable improvements brought about by the new super-rich may one day backfire, with greater controls put on the recently liberalised financial markets.

Also, I think the most essential question does not concern relative wealth in wealthy countries, but relative wealth between countries. Is it an immutable fact of life that there will always, somewhere, be poor people who must suffer in order for others to lead comfortable lives? Is the fact that there are a few uber-wealthy individuals a cause of the problems faced by poor countries?

I don’t think it is a fact of life. I believe that one day we will be able to arrange the matter of this Earth and this solar system is such a way that it can provide for each and every one of us a lifestyle that Bill Gates or George Soros could not buy today.

However until that time we are forced into considering whether a more authoritarian socialist-style redistribution of wealth might not be better for the time being.

Unfortunately “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” simply doesn’t work without an unacceptably powerful (and inevitably corrupt) state, and even when it is created it means that no one has any great need to excel, except for the empty promises of corrupt governments.

What about social democracy? I suspect that Tony Blair’s third way is a reasonably compromise between social justice and individual liberties. Aside from the Really Bad Idea Tony Blair has been a good premier, and has overseen one of the largest redistributions of wealth in history via the family tax credit system.

I think the middle class consensus of greater consumerism and aspiration that allowed the “third way” to work has broadly been a Good Thing, with the obvious (MASSIVE) problem of third-world poverty as the price-tag for cheap(-ish) designer clothes and nice coffee.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way I need to consider more personal things: I know that as an individual I can have very little influence on global affairs. I know it will make little difference if I recycle, or vote for a particular political party, or write a letter to my MP. I will do all of those things at one time or another, and will do so more out of principle than anything else.

However. Is it not my duty as a responsible citizen to extend my influence as wide and as high as I am capable and in doing so enact the changes I believe need to be undertaken? I’m not sure.

There is a difference between being faced with the abstract reality of a few wealthy people vs. the down-to-earth grinding poverty much of humanity is forced to live in and actually being offered the choice of wealth or power. Power corrupts. Good advice, so is the answer to water down power (through democracy) until its debilitating effect is destroyed?

What I’m trying to say is this: I am in a very fortunate position as a young, healthy, male in a progressive Western democracy. There are problems in the world that I feel I can have no effect on as an individual at the moment. I believe that I can amplify my positive effects through gaining large personal wealth (and incidentally having a good time into the bargain – money corrupts, see?), and ganging up with a load of other guilty people and trying to make a New and Better World. Which option should I take?

1. Live an ethically and financially secure life as a middle-class writer/academic/engineer. Vote, recycle, minimise my carbon footprint, write to my MP, attend protests and try to shuffle through life without causing trouble or offence to anyone.
2. Live a somewhat more exciting life as an entrepreneur. Make lotsa money and retire to try to force my idea of what a perfect world should be down various people’s word-holes.

Phrased like that, neither choice seems particularly appealing.

What about the Future?

Between now and the time when the cost of production goes down through magic nanotechnology, everyone is turned into an artificial genius, and everyone gets a butler robot in their own glittering space habitat and the present moment we will need to explore a few important questions:

1. Is large personal wealth broadly a good thing or broadly a bad thing? Answer: broadly a good thing as long as the wealth is created in an entrepreneurial manner and the wealth is not derived from anything that is detrimental to society as a whole.
2. Is capitalism, and the free market, broadly a good thing or broadly a bad thing? Answer: I’m not sure about capitalism, however the free market is a powerful resource allocation tool as well as being a necessary side-effect of personal liberty.
3. Should corporations and limited companies continue to be granted the legal personhood they enjoy today? Answer: Yes, if only to allow for the legal personhood of AI and virtual humans. However corporations should be held to account to a much greater extent than they are today.
4. Will democracy exist in a posthuman world? Can it exist? Should it exist? Answer: probably. Answer: Probably. Answer: Probably.
5. Will a posthuman world be broadly libertarian or broadly socialist? Answer: a glib answer might be that as transhumanists seek to overcome the basic causes of human suffering, the very same thing the socialists and the liberals have been trying to do for three hundred years, then a future society will be libertarian, without a need for a state to nanny and bother and help and hinder. But really it depends on what kind of posthumanity various people end up with. Another way to phrase this question is: “will a posthuman world have an all-powerful state (or dominating organised body or group [to account for group minds {in as much as I can judge what a group mind would be like} etc]) that can override individual liberties to a great extent, or will a posthuman world be anarchistic?”

I understand that this is a somewhat rambling summary of some of my political and economic beliefs, I think I will re-write it a few times in the future.

Comparison

Part of the cause of this speculation is that I have been re-reading Learning the World by Ken MacLeod (in which the segment of The Martyrdom of Man I placed above was quoted) and contrasting it with the equally splendid story The Mayflower II by Steven Baxter, in which a similar interstellar voyage as described in LTW turns out quite differently. Read both stories.

Wealth

One of the things that bugs me about capitalism as a whole and specifically my own desire to be a (wealthy) entrepreneur is the sneaking suspicion that none of what we in Western Europe and North America enjoy (things like liberty, justice, free-speech, democracy, the happiness of pursuit, cheap clothes and fast food) could be possible without those same things being denied to people elsewhere in the world.

I doubt very much that I’d enjoy living in Britain in the period between 1830 and 1860. This was a time when laissez-faire capitalism and pseudo-libertarianism was allowed to run riot. The government created a night-watchman state, and a few individuals enjoyed enormous personal wealth whilst the majority became repressed workers.

Fortunately for me social change over the period from 1860 and 1947 and onward resulted in much greater freedom from economic repression, with true universal suffrage, education, health, and welfare benefits.

It could be argued, however, that nineteenth century Britain was like a microcosm of today’s global economy. There are a few uber-wealthy individuals, a larger fraction of middle-class people (people of median income in Western democracies), and a vast body of people living in what I would consider to be appalling conditions in places like India or China, working their fingers bloody for twelve cents an hour.

William Gibson in reputed to have said “the future is here, just not yet evenly distributed”. IF I am to remain in my happy, progressive bubble that assumes that given a few decades every human on the planet will have a quality of life equal to that of a typical middle-class individual in Britain then I should at least ask why this hasn’t already happened.

What would I have to sacrifice (as a citizen of the UK) if every human being on the planet were to have my standard of living. I once did a test that calculated how many Earths it would take to supply everyone with the same luxuries as myself. It was slightly over two.

It is difficult, though – surely global GDP has gone up over the past several decades? And surely the average individual worker in now more productive than they would have been fifty years ago?

I genuinely believe that there is no reason we can’t all enjoy high(er) and equivalent standards of living and with better healthcare and a flying car to boot. Perhaps in a century all industrial production will be wholly automated. Human beings will just be the brains (and the substantially upgraded brains, at that) of the great clanking replicator of human civilization, which will begin a glorious and wonderful era in which highly civilized, intelligent, and well-equipped individuals will set off into the darkness of space in vast artificial worlds, to build even bigger artificial worlds around all the suns of the galaxy.

Projects

This is a list of projects that need to be undertaken:

• Remove disease as a factor in people’s lives. Cure all diseases of both the body and, if necessary or desirable, the mind.
• Achieve indefinite longevity for adult humans.
• Build a space-based self-sufficient habitat that is completely independent from the Earth.
• Build a space elevator.
• Build a comprehensive network of subterranean detectors that can warn people in advance of earthquakes and other traumas.
• Take all the nuclear weapons currently available for use on Earth and fly them out some considerable distance into space. Set them off, either simultaneously or in smaller groups. Use the immense electromagnetic “flashes” created by these events to map the location and velocity of all the objects in the inner solar system larger than a few tens of metres across, by observing the reflected electromagnetic radiation.
• Any of the aforementioned objects that might collide with the Earth should be tagged, first by unmanned probes, and then their velocities must be altered such that they do not collide with Earth, or are directed into a safe orbit for use in the construction of the space habitats or space elevators.
• Research into various areas of human enhancement should achieve the ultimate aim of giving people choices over how intelligent they are, and how good they can be at any physical or mental task.

The Martyrdom of Man

This is what I have in the way of hopes and dreams of the future.

I already have most of the things that really matter - a good home, a lovoing family, good friends, a stable political and economic environment, pleasant prospects, and a healthy body.

The only thing that is lacking is the luxury of time. I want to be able to study on my own time and in my own fashion. I want to be able to write and comment on writing. I want to be able to tinker with computers and go for long, solitary walks in the countryside.

None of these things require a great deal of money, but they do require a great deal of time. And time is money. I want to leave university at age 24; I want to get a job in a blue chip company for 3 years. Then I want to set up my own company. I’ll work hard for maybe 20 years then retire with a big pile of assets.

Then I want to dedicate my life to transhumanism, nuclear disarmament, improving the human condition (either by directly working in or funding nanotech research, gerontology, space habitat construction, biotech research…),until the human race reaches the level of sophistication that Winwood Reade describes in his book, The Martyrdom of Man:

“Population will mightily increase, and the earth will be a garden. Governments will be conducted with the quietude and regularity of club committees. The interest which is now felt in politics will be transferred to science; the latest news from the laboratory of the chemist, or the observatory of the astronomer, or the experimenting room of the biologist will be eagerly discussed. Poetry and the fine arts will take that place in the heart which religion now holds. Luxuries will be cheapened and made common to all; none will be rich, and none poor. Not only will Man subdue the forces of evil that are without; he will also subdue those that are within. He will repress the base instincts and propensities which he has inherited from the animals below; he will obey the laws that are written on his heart; he will worship the divinity within him. As our conscience forbids us to commit actions which the conscience of the savage allows, so the moral sense of our successors will stigmatise as crimes those offences against the intellect which are sanctioned by ourselves. Idleness and stupidity will be regarded with abhorrence. Women will become the companions of men, and the tutors of their children. The whole world will be united by the same sentiment which united the primeval clan, and which made its members think, feel, and act as one. Men will look upon this star as their fatherland; its progress will be their ambition; the gratitude of others their reward. These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals; our minds have already outgrown them; already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come when Science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained to us, we could not now understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, steam. Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed; immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.”

The Martyrdom of Man was written in 1872, and is prophetic of the sentiment shared by the transhumanists and with myself. This is the world we must all strive to create.

I am not particularly attractive or charismatic, I am not a genius nor particularly clever. I believe it is necessary to solve these problems – through whatever means come available. If the ultimate goal of every intelligent person was to become more intelligent, urbane, talented, wise, compassionate and responsible then the world would be a better place.

Graph Lust

This amazing page combines two of my passions: lists and graphs. It is a wonderfully cyclicly ironic way of displaying information about ways of displaying information.

Achievable Transhumanism

Here is more goodness from the Edge Foundation, Stephen M. Kosslyn, a psychologist at the University of Harvard, is optimistic that we will be able to improve human intelligence. He has three basic points to support this optimism: the first is that neurobiologists have managed to identify several discrete systems within the brain, and have also managed to identify how they work together to perform tasks:

Each system can be made more efficient by "targeted training." Such training involves having people perform tasks that are designed to exercise very specific abilities, which grow out of distinct neural networks. Just as a body builder can do curls to build up biceps and dips on parallel bars to build up triceps, we can design computer-game-like tasks that exercise specific parts of the brain—mental muscles, if you will. By exercising the right sets of systems, specific types of reasoning not only can be improved but—the holy grail of training studies—such improvement can generalize to new tasks that draw on those systems.

This is exactly the sort of cheap, achievable goals that transhumanists need to be talking about. There isn’t any need for smart drugs or neural implants to improve the human mind, all we need to do is understand the mind more effectively and find innovative ways of improving it manually.

The second point is an increased understanding of group interaction, and resulting methods of creating more effective teams.

Just as a mechanical calculator can extend our mental capacities, other people help us extend our intelligence—both in a cognitive sense (as required to solve problems) and in an emotional sense (as required to detect and respond appropriately to emotions, ours and those of others). In this sense, other people can serve as "social prosthetic systems," as extensions of our own brains; a wooden leg can fill in for a missing limb, and others' brains can fill in for our cognitive and emotional limitations.

Teams amplify and strengthen the effects of human achievements. By cultivating a deeper understanding of an individual’s strengths and weaknesses we can create teams that achieve far more than the sum of their parts.

The third point is usually the favourite of transhuman commentators: widgetry.

Some people carry computers with them everywhere they go, and treat Google as an extension of their own knowledge bases. Or, in my case, my PDA extends my organizational ability enormously. We soon will have a wide variety of mechanical helpmates.

Whether being constantly in communication is a good thing or not is debatable, but constant access to the web is useful: a lot of information and knowledge can be acquired very quickly, and much more accurately than from normal human memories

The Edge Foundation

The Edge Foundation have published their annual question at Edge.org. The Edge Foundation, headed by publisher John Brockman is an organisation that represents part of the “third culture”, a movement towards an integration between literary and scientific intellectuals. From Wikipedia:

John Brockman published a book of the same name whose themes are continued at the Edge website. Here, scientists and others are invited to contribute their thoughts in a manner readily accessible to non-specialist readers. In doing so, leading thinkers are able to communicate directly with each other and the public without the intervention of middlemen such as journalists and journal editors. Many areas of academic work are incorporated, including genetics, physics, mathematics, psychology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and computing technology.

This is an excellent idea. I personally think that we should all aim to be as much like polymaths and Renaissance Men as possible, and be skilled in a number of areas. Say, if a chemical engineer played bridge and painted watercolours, wrote stories and articles, whilst also being able to perform yoga and karate and play badminton.

The questions are quite fascinating. I will doubtless comment on them at length in the future.

The Perfect Phone

Note: I actually wrote this on the 7th of January, before Apple announced the iPhone. From what I've seen and read about the iPhone it seems like a step towards what I'm talking about.

I’ve been thinking about the problem surrounding PDAs. Every so often I experience something that leads me to think that maybe my enthusiastically techno-optimist outlook is, if not flawed, then at least misappropriated. There are several disadvantages of using a normal A7 paper notebook over a PDA:

• You can drop a notebook in the sink and any information stored on it will still be accessible (after leaving it in the sun to dry – this can still apply to PDAs, but PDAs would generally be less likely to function after a good dunking).
• Notebooks generally weigh less than PDAs.
• Notebooks do not need recharging.
• You can drop a notebook on the floor and not worry about it breaking.
• Notebooks cost around £2. PDAs cost around £200.

Convergence is, I understand, the current big industry buzzword surrounding consumer electronics. It can, however, be argued that too much convergence leads to a giant Swiss Army Knife problem. Like most individuals with both chromasomes I enjoy the idea of owning a brick containing every possible tool I could ever possibly need, but I’m also aware that I wouldn’t want to carry it around with me.

Sure, it’s nice having a phone that can take pictures, send email, play movies, play music, access the web, send texts and make and receive phonecalls. But a Hack of all Trades can (at least for early adopters) prove to be annoyingly deficient in a way you really don’t want an object you just shelled out £200+ for to be. Things like the autofocus-lag on the 2 MP camera in my SE K750i, or the way the joystick gets clogged up with dust and works erratically.

Of course, I have the economics of consumer electronics to blame for these annoyances [anyone remember when 3G was going to be TNBT? Anyone remember minidisk players? Anyone remember bluray vs. HDDVD… Oh wait, that one hasn’t happened yet], companies are not going to invest in a piece of hardware that will last say, ten years, because they know that in ten years they will have a whole new range of phones to sell to people, and they don’t want people using the phone they bought ten years previously.

Just as the Israelites tired in the desert, so I’m tiring of pursuing the here-today, gone-tomorrow dreams of some white collar corporate sweatshop worker.

What I’m basically saying is that I’m annoyed that I have to swim through what could well be decades of projected-lifespan-six-months, NBTs that screw early adopters, screw everyone else, and become unfashionable just as the technology is perfected, before we get to the good stuff.

Here is a description of the things I want from the electronics industry (after reading it you’ll realise that by the time all of these things are available the electronics industry will either be non-existent or will have evolved into something completely different):

A mobile phone designed to operate well in any environment, and to continue to work without any need for a warranty (however this phone will be supplied with a warranty at least a decade long). This phone will not just be able to talk to other phones through a system of microwave-linked cellular towers but will be able to detect all electromagnetic radiation between say, 10⁶ and 10¹⁶ Hz (a detachable aerial, would probably be required for anything much over 300 MHz), and carry enough processing clout to decode any and all intelligible signals on these frequencies. These signals may include audio, visual, audiovisual, text, still images, encoded software, anything. As much of the processing of this data as possible should be handled in software. Whether the signal is digital, analogue, FM, AM, or Morse code I want this device to be able to tell me what is being said.

The screen will have a definition such that the resolution of my own eyes will be insufficient to isolate a discrete pixel. The screen will be at least 40 mm by 60 mm in size, and the phone will be able to communicate with the surroundings as well (so screen size shouldn’t have to be an issue). The screen will be unscratchable, like the rest of the phone.

The phone will have two cameras that are fully detachable, and intelligent enough to combine to form a large baseline telescope. The cameras will be approximately the size of chart-pins, and will be stored in an isolated compartment within the main phone. There will also be a more standard camera built into the camera itself. This will have a fairly wide-angle camera capturing images at around 60 fps (for recording events to harvest for photographic still-shots later).

The phone will have a voice-activated (set to respond only to my voice-pattern, of course), thoroughly indexed, and wholly searchable encyclopedia, including the entire contents of the British library, the library of Congress, all available stored audiovisual output (i.e. everything ever written, recorded, filmed, or photographed).

In case I get bored with the phone’s fascia (I don’t know materials – some sort of carbon composite…?) the phone will be supplied with an autofabricator that can completely redesign the phone if I wish it to.

As well as maps and an on-board inertial-compass it will of course be able to consult any GPS systems that are available.

Spime, as I have mentioned before, is a powerful and worrying concept. I’m a bit too much of a libertarian (I’m not though) to find the idea of sentient armchairs and talking lamp-shades that remember life back in the CAD software anything but slightly worrying. However it would be nice if, occasionally, there were well-delineated bits of wall that could, if necessary, display text and video images at arbitrarily high definition if asked politely. These areas of wall would of course also be able to communicate with any hardware that happened to be in the vicinity, and would solve the problem of screen-size on mobile devices quite neatly, providing such areas of walls were sufficiently cheap and ubiquitous.

But why even go there? Instead of plastering every flat surface with mediaglyphs why not plaster ever eye-surface with a Head-Up-Display? This would solve the problem of wasting energy displaying data for all the world to see and offer a solution to the problem of viable virtual reality, or actual reality overlays. The contact-lens, or spectacle-based HUD would of course be available in a number of styles from your bedside autofab.

Science and Technology #2

I don’t know whether I should buy a cheap normal laptop and run Ubuntu on it or buy a Mac. I think there is a lot of merit in Macs, but there are also several annoying things (like compatibility) that still need to be dealt with.

I don’t think I have quite enough money to fully enjoy the benefits of technology today, hopefully as technology becomes cheaper and better (c.f. Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns) I’ll reach reach a point where a totally immersive and covergent noosphere will enable me to have access to all the information in the world.

I imagine that this will happen several decades before it becomes viable to download skillsets (software programs that run on your PC and edit your neural structure through your personal nanoware so that you “learn” and “remember” skills without having to go through the tedious process of altering your brain manually.

Things We Need to Do

Following is a list of things that need to be dealt with (these are essentially engineering and scientific problems, political problems will need to be dealt with in the shorter term):

Mature nanotechnology: as demonstrated by the RepRap, it is becoming clear that nanotechnology (coupled with another technology, see below) will sort out quite a few of our problems). Once material wealth can be “made” by a machine that itself only requires energy and raw mass (the most advanced post-nanotech replicators will presumably need only energy) then a significant proportion of the iniquities in life will be resolved and done away with.

Fusion: in order to supply a crowded planet with sufficient energy whilst maintaining the integrity of the biosphere for future generations (and for ourselves, see below) it is necessary to create an elegant fusion reactor that produces significantly more energy than it consumes. This will remove any further material iniquity. We will have energy “too cheap to meter”, and the means of production will be owned by anyone and everyone. I suspect this will result in a sort of libertarianism.

Gerontology: the Great Aubrey de Gray believes that if we approach the problem of aging as a purely engineering problem we can overcome it and achieve “engineered negligible senescence”. This is a worthy cause, and will help to remove another great source of iniquity, that which is bestowed by an essentially hostile universe.

Transhumanism: is, as far as I can see, the only contemporary philosophy that has it right with regard to science and technology and adopts the most progressive, mature, and pragmatic attitude towards the potential and the peril of emerging biotechnology and AI. Democratic transhumanism (combining as it does elements of liberal democracy, humanism, and transhumanism) is an ideology that I can believe in and respect. Transhumanism also aims to remove the last of the great iniquities – with material wealth, wealth of resources and so forth dismissed – we would be left with only the basic lack of equality bestowed by our genes and bodies. And then hopefully all the problems would be solved.

The Space Movement: we need to have a (and preferably more than one) functioning self-contained extraterrestrial biosphere, capable of supporting a breeding population of human beings and other animals. My favourite for this one would be an asteroid (e.g. Ceres) hollowed out, a la the Thistledown and inhabited by humans in centrifuges. I hope that some new technology will emerge to allow us to build materials with sufficient tensile strength to overcome the strain of rotating fast enough to produce 9.8 m/s of accelerating centripetal force.

The Ridiculously Huge Telescope: the barriers to understanding currently stand at the limits of the very small and very large. To ensure our survival we need to fully understand our universe. That means we need to see further and in greater detail than before. To do this we need to build a telescope with a baseline as large as the solar system

The Ridiculously Huge Particle Accelerator: we need to see what the fundamental stuff of the universe is. Once we’ve done that we can start really sorting stuff out. To do this we should build a particle accelerator as large as the solar system.

Sentimental Ostriches

There is a pernicious body of opinion gaining ground among those that care that the solution to our supposed demise in teenage civility, in the form of yobs, chavs, and ASBO-culture, would be a return to the Good Old Days of the fifties, before wishy-washy lefty liberals were allowes to crawl all over our education system

A recent report from the Institute for Public Policy Research suggests that a return to the "house system" in state schools would help combat alienation of youth. The IPPR also suggests that paramilitary organisations like the scouts should be encouraged.

There's a head teacher campaigning for the re-introduction of the fountain pen as the usual means of writing in schools as a means of improving literacy.

Naturally I disagree with this sort of sentimentalism. As to the fountain pen initiative, I'm sure the head in question had the best of motives, but are we really so ridiculously up ourselves that we can't realise that literacy has a lot more to do with how students are taught, rather than what they are taught to write with?

As to the IPPR report - I find it depressing that researchers can so readily accept that A: education was better in the 1950s and B: encouraging vague sentimentalism will not lead to confusion over the key issue of education.

A cursory glance of this weblog will show you that my standards of literacy are not top-notch, but I doubt that being able to write pretty, copperplate, longhand will improve my typing skillz. One of the major means of mass-communication that students will have to deal with as adults will be that of email and - as anyone who uses both keyboards and pens - I can tell you that the two are so different that it makes little difference what you learn to write in longhand script, you will still cut corners and use txt and other wonderful embellishments to the written language.

Besides, one of the funniest books I've ever read was Molesworth by Geoffrey Williams. It satirises the prose of a fifties schoolboy, complete with divine illustrations by the great Ronald Searle. Anyway, it just goes to show that every generation decries the state of the preceding generation.

How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker has written an excellent book here. I don’t properly understand the subtleties of his argument but he seems to be saying that a large part of who we are is inherent in our genes.

I don’t have any particularly strong feelings in the controversy such a position seems to conjure up. There is a strong body of intellectual opinion that has always decried any such argument as fascistic and racist (because it is said to suggest that people might actually be inferior (for a largely arbitrary value of superiority) by virtue of their genetics.

Pinker also notes that as our understanding of how the mind functions increases we will inevitably be slicing away at any concept of free will. Rationally speaking, there is no supernatural homunculus sitting in a Cartesian theatre in our pineal gland. Therefore our behaviour, what we would consider to be the product of free will and consciousness, is simply the result of chaotic interactions between the outside world and various areas of our brain.

Pinker himself offers a solution to these moral conundrum: view the scientific debate, in which human beings are mechanical objects, and the moral debate, in which all humans are afforded equal rights under the law, as two separate arenas of debate.

I agree with this: all men may not be created equal by virtue of their talents, skin colour, gender, financial security, and upbringing. But everyone is considered an equal and rational freely determined being under the law.

It's All Just Meat

When faced with the breadth and majesty of books like The Singularity is Near, Engines of Creation and Hacking Matter it is difficult not to feel inspired and optimistic about the future. There is a particular brand of techno-progressive idealogue who can weave images in the mind as effectively as any of the technologies they predict.

There is a problem. Ray Kurzweil calls it "the argument from incredulity". The picture of a plentiful future peopled by synthetic superhumans is so compelling it registers on our internal TGTBTM (Too Good To Be True Meter) as a being unreasonably optimistic.

Most rational people who don't live within the bleeding edge of pattern-recognition technologies simply refuse to accept that the clanking, smoking, bad-for-the-environment hulks of machined metal that are what most people still associate with the word "machine" could ever turn into anything as sublimely effective and versatile as a human being.

It is interesting to look back at how technological changes have been predicted to occur and how they actually did occur. Take the widely-predicted advent of powered flight in the late Victorian era. We see those wonderfully fanciful drawings of individuals flitting around in one-man ornithopters. The artist that comes to mind is Heath Robinson, although his were probably actually drawn in the early twentieth century.

One of the great fears of the Victorians, as exemplified by the writing of H.G. Wells, was the concept of "war in the air" (the other great fear being that of the advent of powered cavalry). That WITA became a terrible reality through the Blitz of London within the lifetimes of many of those already adults during the Victorian era suggests that our current fears of GM viruses, dangerous artificial intelligences and rampant nanotechnology scenarios may not be as far-fetched as we could imagine.

I disagree with Kurzweil's sweeping "law of accelerating returns". The most compelling point he makes in support of this is that over the lifetime of the universe, complexity has tended to increase in a manner which strongly resembles an exponential graph.

However when we get down to the nitty-gritty level of technological development over the years and decades of a human lifetime "progress" (an amorphous term in this debate) seems to happen in fits and starts, and is strongly influenced by political and economic factors.

That a young (perhaps 20 year-old) Victorian in 1900 growing up in a world without heavier than air flight could live to see the Apollo and the Moon landings (Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) springs to mind) is an extraordinary thing.

Another point to consider before dismissing Kurzweil entirely is the nature of technological change. The counterpart of the technology of aircraft in the early twentieth century is the development of computers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Computers tend to affect things in ways that were difficult to comprehend beforehand. Highly efficient information management and versatile and decentralised communication generate a lot of side-effects that would not be immediately obvious to someone who was not aware of computers.

Spime and conversion and the gradual move from centralised manufacturing towards decentralised CAD/CAM machines will allow the effects of abundant, effective computing to move from the world of pure information to the real world the rest of us inhabit.

At the moment our world is still very much run by meat. Humans are required for their versatility and imagination, if for little else. I think that of all Ray Kurzweil's predictions, the most likely to turn out to be correct is his belief that there will be a strong convergence between human and machine intelligence with the result of an (even more) profound change in the way the world works.

The Future of Business

With all this talk of of global warming it is becoming painfully clear that something must be done.

Fortunately someone is doing something. After suffering years of disappointment with electric cars someone has finally developed something intriguing. The EEStor is a ceramic battery that promises a lot: "A four-passenger sedan will drive like a Ferrari."

Kudos to these pioneering entrepeneurs. There's something wonderfully wholesome about the concept of the electric car - I hope to own one myself one day.

I'm interested to see what the percentages of biofuel (alcohols and other vegetable-derived fluids), hyrogen fuel cell or "electric battery" cars will be in the future. In Brazil, there is such a thing as a "tribrid" car. Maybe that is what we'll end up with.

Reading List #1

This is the list of books that I need to read:

• Hacking Matter - Wil McCarthy
• Collapse - Jared Diamond
• How to Get Rich - Felix Dennis
• Hughes - Richard Hack
• Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
  
• Hyperspace - Michio Kaku
• Galactic North - Alastair Reynolds
• The Man's Book - Thomas Fink
• The Honorable Schoolboy - John le Carre
• Distraction - Bruce Sterling
• Imagining the Tenth Dimension - Rob Bryantan
  

A New Wikipedia?

Another new free online encyclopaedia has been announced today: Citizendium. I don't quite understand the relationship between this new venture and the Digital Universe, also created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. According to the FAQ at the "Citizendium" website the Citizendium project is entirely independant of the Digital Universe project.

As somebody comments on the Citizendium talk page at Wikipedia it will be interesting to see whether there will be any possible conflict of interest for Sanger. Which of the two institutions should he devote most time to?

Anyway, something that strikes a balance between the egalitarian and comprehensive Wikipedia and the reliable and credible Britannica will be brilliant. I look forward to downloading it onto a PDA...

Science and Technology #1

Bruce Sterling is a very fine science-fiction writer. He is also a very distinguished individual in the field of design, particularly pertaining to environmental design and "green" technologies, being the central figure of the Viridian Design Movement.

Another area in which Sterling has been an active commentator is that of "spime". This is one of those ideas that, when you first hear it, you dismiss as being so blindingly obvious that no-one should deserve recognition for it's "invention".

However after reading about it a little, then going away and reading about it some more, I gradually came to realise that spime as a concept is not a vague neologism but a very relevent modern-day topic, and an inevitable product of the convergence of information technology and the material world.

Consider the fact that today, most products (like toys, electrical goods, cars, computer-components, peripherals, buildings, pharaceutical plants...) are designed in software on a computer. They will then probably be instantiated by machines.

Once they have been completed, transported from the factory and sold to the consumer, and used by the consumer they may well be recycled. And hopefully one day all items will be recycled.

However this raises an interesting question: exactly where does the "object" (whatever it may be) come into existence? Is it when it is put together on the assembly line? Is it when it is first created in the virtual environment of the CAD software?

The fact is that the "object", as an abstraction, can be said to have existed from the moment it is concieved in VR. As technology advances, it will become cheaper and cheaper to manufacture computer chips (or their technological descendants) and cheaper to build them into objects as a matter of course.

These chips will have memory, processing capability, sensory capability and an awareness of where they are in space and time, and what they are. The blueprint for these chips will exist along with the object they are embedded within in the virtual CAD environment.

When it is time for the object to be recycled the chips will guide the object to its final destination (imagine a sandwich-wrapper lying on a pavement saying "please deposit me in the jive-coded waste receptacle...").

Once the object is recycled there will remain a complete record of the objects life. Where and when it was designed, who by, where it was manufactured, where it was taken, where it was used, who by, what for, and finally where it has been recycled.

This sounds very Orwellian, especially when you consider that factories in the future may be very compact and verstatile, and capable of manufacturing objects from the atoms upward. This will mean that potentially the food we eat, and even our bodies can be tagged, recorded and monitored at an incredible level of detail.

Who controls spimes, and who has access to the information, will be a key topic of political debate in the future, and the near future. Of Sterling's six facets of spime several already have representative technologies. The six are:

1) Small, inexpensive means of remotely and uniquely indentifying something over a distance (e.g. radio frequency identification).

2) A mechanism to precisely locate something on Earth (e.g. a global positioning system).

3) A way to effectively mine the large quantities of data produced by these systems (e.g. modern web search engines).

4) Tools to virtually construct any object in a virtual environment (e.g. AutoCAD, and various molecular-modelling programs).

5) Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into physical objects (there are various "3D printers", but we're not yet very near the garage-level universal assembler)

6) Cheap and effective recycling.

The potential good for this kind of convergence is huge. However there are numerous potential pitfalls and problems. I look forward to exploring these in thought, and maybe later in the real world.

Absolute Friends

Recently I read Absolute Friends by ace spy-novelist and former spy John le Carre. The style of writing is incredibly readable, like warm apple juice it flows liquid and amber off the page and into your mind.

The anger and sense of betrayal the writer displays towards the British authorities for colluding with the Americans over the Iraq War is tangible.

Considering this lead me to analyse my own position regarding the US of A. I agree that the idea of American liberal democracy is compelling and I support it entirely, but the reality of present day America is rather different.

Hypocrisy is perhaps the greatest of the great media-oriented political crimes of our age. To preach against something and then do that thing yourself is seen as being qualitatively worse than simply doing the thing in the first place.

It irritates me that when a politician is caught committing political incorrectness, they are attacked more for their perceived earlier "holier than thou" stance than for whatever thoughtcrime they are meant to have committed. I suspect that this is a punishment by the mass media, which sees itself as the sole rightful arbiter of what is worthy and what is wrong.

That said there is something deeply sickening about a certain frame of mind that seem to be prevalant in America today. By far the biggest beneficiary of direct aid from the federal government are the large public limited companies.

These corporations present a fatuous image of what used to be called "The American Dream" in which these vast, monolithic, hierarchical, and deeply entrenched organisations play the card of righteous independence from government whenever they are demanded to reign in on issues like making vehicles that are more fuel-efficient, or when the American government threatens to cut subsidies that have prevented poverty-stricken African farmers from selling their crops.

In political discourse policies and political parties are generally defined along a rather strange spectrum. Fascists at one end, Stalinists at the other. I believe that this spectrum is obsolete. When the common man is being ground underfoot by authority, he doesn't care if the authority is a corporation, private company, government, state, or religion. We should define things in terms of what they are, not what they say they are.

Birmingham University

Sorry about failing to write anything for a long time. There is a really rather bad reason for this, which I'd rather not go into at the moment.

Anyway. Several days ago I went to Birmingham University. It was quite good. I thought it was very warm and inviting, clearly well-equiped in my chosen subject (chemical engineering) and generally rather good.

It would be singularly inapropriate of me to make any further statements regarding anything else about this institution, the teaching quality is deemed excellent by the most recent reviewers. The research quality is also considered to be very high.

It is on my shortlist of six institutions as stipulated by UCAS, along with: Imperial College London, University College London, Manchester University, Nottingham University and Sheffield University.

Patternism

After thinking about Ray Kurzweil’s ideas, and reading Permutation City Greg Egan I’m coming to the conclusion that – from a theological standpoint – what is key to who we are as people is indeed the pattern rather than the material.

The pattern has nothing to do with the soul (if such a thing exists, which I doubt, and as such is essentially irrelevent) as the pattern it is not necessarily immortal. It needs a substrate in which to exist, and most substrates are finite (with the exception of the pocket universe Egan explores in PS).

The idea of a “gradual submersion” into a cybernetic substrate is one I’m very comfortable with (the idea of an abrupt “ending” of one pattern and the beginning of another on a different substrate, though consistent with my belief in the importance of the pattern, goes against my instincts. These are flawed, of course, but are nevertheless part of who I am).

Permutation City and the New Mind

Permutation City is extraordinary. Egan never relies on techno-babble BS to create convincing worlds. All his alternate realities are rooted in a totally feasible (sounding) model of real-world physics. He doesn’t rely on magic or demons to make things work. Because of my studies of physics and maths I actually understand enough for it to be engaging, though the fact that Egan is such a good writer means even if I hadn’t studied these subjects I’d still enjoy the story. I’m still a little confused about something to do with layers of reality used in the book. But as the whole story deals – very skillfully and insightfully – with the nature of virtual reality and the virtual mind, it is not surprising that there are some weird cogito ergo sum moments and a lot of Cartesian uncertainty.

The likes of Stross and MacLeod often use backups and “digital people” as plot devices and characters, but Egan really gets into the concept: discussing the identity and self-perception of the virtual humans, and how they all relate to virtual minds in virtual realities. As always Egan’s view of the future is highly realistic. A key part of the plot involves the fact that “copies” of humans can only “run” at 1/19^th the rate of normal flesh-and-blood human beings. This turns the usual belief that virtual human minds will run faster than normal humans on its head, and makes for some interesting observations.

There is also the usual philosophical debate: if someone is an indentical virtual copy of someone else are they that person? From my Kurzweil-oriented point of view, I believe that what is key in this situation is the pattern of information. From the millisecond the copy and the original data construct (say: a flesh and blood human) diverge then they become two different people. What is key is the pattern of data, not the substrate in which that data (or information) exists, hence a digital person, a virtual person, an “analogue” F&B person, or a person that is described by the actions of a weak Turing-complete system (i.e. a machine or computer that can perform any computational task).

Terry Pratchett explores these ideas in The Fifth Elephant. At the end of the book Sam Vimes is presented with an axe by the dwarf King. The dwarf observes that if Vimes’ ancestors were to replace the blade, and then their ancestors were to replace the handle – then could it be said to be the same axe?

It is a widely-believed fact that every atom in the human body is replaced every seven years, and the atoms of the material we think of as being most intimately “us” – the brain, CNS, nerves etc – are replaced every few months. This demonstrates that it is not the lumpen matter that matters when it comes to defining a person (without unnecessarily invoking supernatural irrelevences like the “soul”, or weird quantum “stuff” a la Roger Penrose). It also demonstrates that people are dynamic: I wasn’t the same person I was a few seconds ago. I’m not the same person I’ll be in a year.

I feel I can be forgiven for being squeamish: when the technology to upload your brain or a part of your brain into software (and run it at = to or > baseline speeds) becomes available I would rather tip-toe into the swimming pool, rather than dive in all at once.

By this I mean I would choose to model a small area of my brain, then devise an item of hardware that can respond in exactly the same way to stimuli as the area I have scanned does. The item would contain a computer running a simulation of the area of the brain it is designed to replace, and sufficient hardware to interact with the surrounding areas of the brain in the same manner as the original area.

This “hardware” is likely to require extremel complex devices. I don’t know enough neurobiology to be specific, though I imagine that simulating hormones, neurons, and the intricacies of the human brain are likely to be difficult. From this point of view it would be much easier to simply render the entire structure in virtual reality. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about the interface problem.

Over time I would gradually “build up” the area of my brain running in synthetic substrates, until the whole thing is wholly synthetic. Assuming, of course, that such a state does not compromise my health, mental or otherwise. The likely benefits: including the ability to “learn” new skills by reinforcing the appropriate mental pathways and speeding up my perception of time will hopefully, eventually outweigh the possibly downsides.

UCL

My visit to UCL went well. I saw the Jeremy Bentham auto-icon. He seemed like a stand up guy, and the whole place seemed fairly good. It's definitely in my top three unis.

Girl with a One Track Mind

As I mentioned before, whilst camping in Wales I read several Guardians. In one of them there was an interview with “Abby Lee”, the pseudonym of a woman whose name I can’t remember.

Anyway, for the last two years she has been writing a sex blog. Recently she had it published as a book, and she was also “outed” by The Telegraph. She seems an interesting person, and considers herself a socialist.

Today in The Week I read an article that claimed that George W Bush’s Republicans had lost the approval of the South Park Republicans. As much as I like South Park, and agree with their general sentiment, I disagree with the specific “…I hate conservatives, but I really hate fucking liberals…” where their general sentiment is the idea that you’re either a bible-bashing redneck or a self-righteous liberal activist like Michael Moore. I feel sympathy with my fellow disaffected youth across the pond, but why don’t the Americans realise that everything that underpins America is liberal.

For Americans it seems that “liberal” has become synonymous with soft, self-serving (in the sense of personal image, rather than the financial selfishness of conservatives), smug, celebrity driven causes. In some cases it seems that “liberal” is almost seen as being …shudder… socialist!

I know there are probably millions of USAmericans that are liberal and also aware that Michael Moore is the worst sort of propagandist (the ones we all feel we have to agree with anyway), but my overwhelming impression of America is of blindingly stupid (and inevitably old and decrepit) politicians, largely ignorant masses, a healthcare system like something out of the 19^th century, and of course George W Bush.

OK. Here’s the problem. Every day people go out into the world in whatever country they live in and try to earn enough money to pay the bills, feed the kids, and maybe generate a little surplus for enjoying the finer things in life. However if we’re going to do this effectively we need to compartmentalise our lives a little. Those of us who read newspapers regularly, watch TV, read blogs, and generally try and retain a feel for the world around us have to build walls between “real life” and “news life” in order to function.

By this I mean that if we were to suddenly realise exactly how lucky we are, and also realise the the existence of and the depth of the suffering and hard work of people in other countries are required to undergo to ensure we have eight different types of coffee to choose from, or innumerate plastic toys shoved into our semi-recycled child's portion meals we know damn well we shouldn't be buying but feel oddly compelled to anyway.

I don't know what we'd do if the repressed masses abroad decided they'd had enough of selfish fiscal policies and corporate-based economic repression, but I doubt it would be very pleasant for us.

Stereotypes are a neat way of compressing all the information that streams into our consciousness (or would if we paid any attention to it) into a nice, clear little labels that mean we can get on with the business of living without having to worry. This kind of mental compartmentalisation is quite important, but can be a problem as well.

The problem is stereotypes are such a damn-fine brain tool that we’re always a little reluctant to give them up.

Somewhat tortuously, this brings me back to Abby Lee. For me, the key flaw in socialism is that is replaces economic tyranny (e.g. the wage slave or the inhabitants of 19th century workhouses) with a different type of control (as in Stalinist Russia or North Korea). I think key to any reasonable socialist state is democracy which, for some reason, always seems to be lacking in radically socialist (i.e. communist) countries.

I would probably describe my own political position as secular, humanist, liberal-socialist democratic. In terms of the less-than-perfect "political spectrum" I'd say I was ever so slightly left of centre.

Tired of Life

I'm going down to London on Wednesday for a tour of UCL campus and general U of L Open Day infodumping event. Incidentally, Senate House, the central office for the Federal University of London was the home of the Ministry of (for?) Information during WWII.

It was here that George Orwell worked as a humble clerk before writing 1984, in which "The Ministiry of Truth" plays a major role as the workplace of the protagonist. Senate House contains the office that was the inspiration for the infamous "Room 101" and features as the HQ of the Ministry of Truth in the film of the book.

Terrorism

Sometimes I feel angry about the stupidity of our politicians and our foreign policy. I also feel angry at the stupidity and casual cruelty that seems so common in world affairs, and the general lack of any kind of meaningful liberal resistance to the tabloid-promoted moral hysteria that seems so pernicious at the moment. Nothing is quite as distasteful as reaidng some of the frenzied red-top headlines that preach for a justice that any decent person will leave in the middle ages.

Another cause for alarm is the simultaneously disquieting and ineffective initiatives of our government when it comes to combating terrorism. TJ is going to die in a mangled auto or a hospital bed: I’m not going to die in a terrorist attack. I will probably be affronted or annoyed at some point by the measures put in place to combat terrorism, but apart from the harm from that, I am statistically more likely to suffer by having myself and several members of my family killed or maimed by a freak lightening storm than I am by a terrorist outrage.

When it comes to terrorism, the objective of the terrorists is very clear. Terror. Now the fact that 52 people died on the 7^th of July last year in London is shocking, awful, and horrifying. But it doesn’t exactly have me quaking in my shoes, largely because of the aforesaid improbability that the terrorists will actually get me, but also because I know that the correct response to such a (literally) self-destructive ideology is quiet pity and positive action.

What I mean by positive action is this: stop invading other countries. Apologise for the immense harms rendered on the Arabic world by Western Powers collectively, and by the British specifically (witness the “Great Game of the 19^th century, and most of the 20^th century). Dissacociate ourselves from TGWoT, admitting that it is essentially an excuse to wail on whoever the hell we feel like (if you’re Russian, the Chechens, if you’re Turkish, the Kurds, if you’re Israeli, the Palestinians, if you’re Indian, the Tamil Tigers…). And generally try to behave as a responsible, progressive, liberal and democratic nation should.

This is not capitulating to the terrorists. Capitulating to the terrorists would involve acting like they want us to act: big and bad and evil. We could do this by invading a bunch of other nations, or locking up a bunch of innocent people, or clamping down on our own freedoms and exposing the hypocrisy at the core of corrupt Western society. Oh wait...