An Unapologetic Rant

Warning: the following rant was written down more out of self-indulgent narcissism (something my generation knows quite a lot about, apparently…) than for any more constructive purpose. If you experience passionate rage when faced with such things then I suggest you look away before reading the end of this paragraph, like, now!

Wow, thank goodness we got rid of that lot. Now on to the rant:

If asked to define the zeitgeist of the early C21, in the UK, in one word, I would probably reply: “nostalgia”. There are those cheap, bloated (but nevertheless compulsive) nostalgiathons of the “100 Best…” genre. The “new” music scene is dominated by derivative indie, soft-rock, brain-candy pop music, and a raft of remixes and re-releases. There doesn’t seem to be any “new” music. There is nothing heard on Radio 1 nowadays (with the possible exception of Chris Moyles) that would shock or alienate my parents or their peers, as their parents were by their choice of music, much of which remains popular with my peers.

Mainstream interest in movies has devolved to the one-shot blockbuster/DVD release in two months paradigm. There are films with genuine merit being produced, even for mainstream audiences, and doubtless there is also a vast sea of independent and alternative films being created, but this creativity does not filter into the wider market.

Maybe it is that the current generation of media bosses is dominated by tie-died hippies and dissolute baby-boomers, maybe it is that decades of “progress” seem to have resulted in unhappiness, alienation, social problems, and all the horrific absurdities of global politics. Maybe we are being cynically manipulated by millennialist, antihuman evildoers into thinking that the world is shortly to end and that we must all repent for our Sins of Profligacy, Gluttony, Lust, Envy, Sloth etc. Maybe the fact that there are more baby-boomers than there are of us (generations X-Y) and they have so much more wealth accounts for the obsession with the past.

Or it could be that as far as most of humanity is concerned it is Business as Usual, bearing in mind that a third of humanity has no access to electricity and as such Business as Usual is a nasty and brutish mode of existence.

That Something Needs to be Done to solve the problems of the world is well known. Exactly what is to be done is to continue as we are. By this I mean continue pressing the environment and ethical living as important issues, and actually acting on our own rhetoric. Losing jets is going to be hard. Also losing your own car is going to be hard. But these things will probably be necessary. I’m not sure if removing our ridiculous prohibition (in the West generally, and in the UK and the USA especially) on dangerous drugs will be painful, so much as unnecessarily difficult.

The Internet, the source of a great deal of “new” art (or a lot of derivative remixes created by American teenagers with a Mac and too much free time, or British teenagers with a mobile and too much free time, and then put on YouTube) remains important, and has lead to enormous change already.

Virtual-space design will become important. A story out today says that the value of the current crop of virtual worlds is already at around £511 million.

But the logical next step for the global network is to decentralise further, to the extent that it becomes impossible to censor or control the internetwork. This next step will certainly involve mesh networking technologies, and wireless ad-hoc networks. These offer the possibility of another paradigm (my sincerest apologies for using the word “paradigm” twice in the same article): an even freer and more controversial one than today’s Internet.

As an aside, I have been watching Adam Curtis’ wonderful programme The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom, which (ironically – considering the root of this post) makes excellent use of stock footage to create atmosphere and emphasis. It tackles an interesting and complex subject – a real-life gritty SF novel in which the mindless pursuit of targets is produced by a mathematical genius as the optimum way of creating spontaneous order in a society, only for everyone to find that it doesn’t work quite as well as they would like to think…

The kind of self-directing, decentralised mechanisms of the free market are powerful tools for resource allocation, but like all tools are not much good without a sentient and intelligent entity to wield them. As George W said in one of his more lucid moments, a dictatorship really would be a lot easier. Even evolution, often held up as an example of this sort of “invisible hand” effect in practice, is not that good at finding optimum scenarios (in my last post I commented on the eating-hole/breathing-hole combination, that is not to mention the reproductive-hole/waste-disposal-hole combination… […maybe having fewer holes is a survival trait…?]), and as Curtis comments in the programme, the selfish gene concept isn’t the whole story.

I think the lesson of game theory is that you should never underestimate the complexity of a system, use a scientific method, and always take into account that you might be dead wrong.

The key point is that we are not going to do anything useful by obsessing about the past. An awareness of genuine historical situations is always useful (in fact, essential), but the trivial and sentimental attitude towards the past that seems to pervade at the moment does little to prepare us for the future.

Smoke and Mirrors

Practical and constructive solutions as to what to do about global warming are much more welcome than demands to stop using electricity, cars, jets, plastic, or transported food.

It irritates me that this article from Yahoo! News describes these ideas as crazy. If it can be done, and if it works, and if it doesn't cause enormous horrible side-effects then it is worth considering.

My favourite idea in this world-engineering vein has been the "gigantic space mirror". It seems wonderfully hubris, but more importantly would give us an excuse to get into space.

Once we have a toehold in space we can begin real space development, construction of a space elevator, self-sufficient space habitat, start mining the asteroids, dismantle Mercury to build a Dyson swarm, and build floating cities in Venus' atmosphere - all the usual things.

Because if it's not the nuclear bombs, or the global warming, or the plagues, or the asteroid impacts, or the earthquakes, or the gamma-ray bursts, it will be something else that gets us. Existential threats surround us, and their prevalence may account for the Fermi paradox.

We need to use the vast resource of oil we are fortunate enough to have to bootstrap ourselves to the next level of technology. Molecular nanotechnology offers enormous potential because it involves manipulating matter at the most fundamental level. If developed to its fullest extend, along with genetic-algorithm-based design software and other things we haven't even thought of yet, it would also create a self-sustaining, self-operating, self-designing, and highly durable "technosphere" independent of the need for human intervention or maintenance.

Why would such a thing be desirable? There is a sort of paranoia about handing too much control over to artificial machines. I believe this is rooted mostly in our knowledge that machines are unreliable in all but the most routine of circumstances, and sometimes they break down. This is why jet-aircraft still have pilots, and trams still have drivers.

But if artificial machinery becomes more like naturally-evolved machinery it would become at least as durable as we and our biosphere are (...if not more so, because it would be less restricted in terms of its use of materials, and it could apply sentience to the problem of design, eliminating flaws like the combining of the breathing-hole and the eating-hole in land dwelling vertebrates...) and these objections to handing control to artificial machines would be irrelevant.

The argument that suggests that "the evil computer will take over the world" is an interesting one. I believe that if we are ever to create an AI that will equal or exceed human "intelligence" (however we quantify such a thing) its mind will need a model of the world at least as good as ours, a model of all the most complex things in that world (including humans) as good as ours, and it would need a model of itself at least as good as ours.

Such a thing would undoubtedly be sentient, as it would be able to view and map its internal processes as well as (and probably much better than) we can. In fact, it would be very close to being a human mind.

Such a mind would be in pretty much the same position as the rest of us as regards taking over the world, but it is worth pointing out that if we imagine this future to be as democratic as the present. Given space, and full human rights, and citizenship of a state, there is no reason why an AI/upload/virtual person couldn't create enough independent copies of itself to affect the outcome of elections.

But such an AI would go beyond human. Part of the power of software programs is they can rapidly modify themselves to suit the job they are doing. Imagine if you could increase your level of curiosity over the tedious report you have to write for work, or become more logical for a maths exam, or develop hand-eye coordination for a badminton match.

So I imagine that the first "true AI" will simply be incredibly accurate models of human beings running on a computational substrate. In this case it won't be a matter of "handing over control to the machines" as it will be simply giving control to those in the best position to use it (I'm assuming human beings running on this substrate will experience time at the same speed or greater than human beings - but I suspect that we will be able to develop computers powerful enough).

Once we have a durable technosphere then, for the first time ever, everything that really matters in this world will not be stuck within three pounds of goo, protected by a thin layer of bone from all the nastiness of the universe.

Or so the transhumanists would have us believe...

Anyway. Realistically, we need to conserve our oil resources, keep our industrial infrastructure, gain a substantial hold in space (including Earth orbit, the Lagrangian points, the Moon, the asteroids, Mars, and Jupiter), develop the third world, and conserve the beauty that can be seen in our only example of a functioning biosphere. That means (for the time being) nuclear power, unless someone comes up with a decent fusion-power-generator.

And a giant-space-mirror would also be pretty cool.

More on Global Warming

Another point worth making about the global warming debate is this: if history, both human and geological, has taught us anything it is that the climate changes all the time. To say that the climate is "changing" is like saying... the weather is changing. Weather changes on a daily basis. The global climate changes on a timescale of decades, centuries and millennia.

Consider this: suppose we had discovered that CO2 emissions due to human industrial activity were causing a greenhouse effect that was causing the global temperature to rise. Suppose then everyone said: well OK, so what do we do now? The people from developing countries would say: "Well we want to develop into healthy, liberal, progressive, democratic, industrial countries like the UK and Sweden and Germany - you guys had the huge advantage of massive natural resources and not having to worry about CO2 emissions when you had your enlightenment/industrial revolution phase - we need to produce CO2 to develop!"

To which the developed nations will reply: "Well I guess we need to ration oil and so forth so that developing countries will have a share as they industrialise, but the problem is that it is sub-Saharan Africa that will suffer most if global temperatures rise! Perhaps we shouldn't let the Africans develop! For their own good!"

A bit of a catch 22. Made worse by the fact that oil is a finite resource.

It is worth pointing out that at the root of all this is people. It is people that matter. The Earth is a ball of iron and rock floating through space, it doesn't need us. The global ecology is more resilient and diverse than anything ever created by humans, it doesn't need us.

It is sad that the most interesting (to us) and wonderful (to us) creatures are likely to suffer from climate-change-induced Gaian down-sizing. I think that we should certainly try to store as much of the genetic diversity of our planet before it disappears as we can, particularly if it is disappearing due to human activity (regardless of greenhouse-gas produced by humans causing climate change).

However there are fragile, frail human beings living in circumstances that we in the developed states would hate to live in. These people want desperately to be like us and live longer, happier, and have more fun.

We need to sweep away all the politics and Green pseudo-morality and decide how we will get out of this catch 22 and improve the standards of living and fend off the most horrible things there are: death, disease, poverty and war.

This article from The Guardian irritates me because it doesn't address the points I mention. It also rather blithely dismisses the arguments offered in TGGWS out of hand. This strikes me as rather lazy, after all if CO2 emissions rise and fall after changes in temperatures, which could actually be caused by solar activity, via the mechanism of the oceans drawing in CO2 when they are cold and emitting CO2 when they are hot (or was that the other way around?), then it is certainly worth commenting on.

The global warming cause has been hijacked by those who believe in a rather puritan two-legs-bad, four-legs-and-trees-good version of environmentalism. It is all rather worrying.

Global Warming

Following Thursday's The Great Global Warming Swindle on C4, I thought quite a lot about the affect of global warming on my life. I realised that for me, global warming exists as a leaden fact of existence. I feel vaguely guilty when I find the door left open, the car engine running when queuing at the traffic lights, or see the accusatory red standby light, even in other people's homes.

I heard an interesting programme on radio 4 a few weeks ago, that discussed global warming from a sociological and moral standpoint. It seems that every thousand years a kind of millennialist miserabilism overcomes humanity. Factions rise that claim that Bad Things Will Happen if people don't Change Their Ways For The Better.

Themes common to the religiously-inspired sandwich-board-wearing apocalypsists of history and today's current breed of Green pro-environment doom-mongers include a penchant for attacking the status-quo, those in authority and simultaneously asserting that things will only get better if we all individually pitch in and become more morally righteous.

As Martin Durkin's documentary washed over me I went through various stages:

1. Immediate denial before I even saw the documentary.
2. Realisation that denying something can be true before hearing the arguments to support it is highly questionable at best, and similar to those die-hard, pro-ignorance groups I've always disliked at worst.
3. As I watched the documentary and noted the arguments I experienced a slight (and doubtless intentional) lifting of the spirit at the thought of a future that did not include human-derived global warming.
   
4. This was closely followed by concern that this would cause ordinary people (like myself, but not as much) to excuse their lazy and selfish dismissal of a real problem.
   
5. Temporary outrage at the super-scripting of the "2" in CO2 emissions in the charmingly retro-fifties explanatory diagrams.
   
6. Quiet pondering.

I agree with Durkin that global warming has become far too politicised, whilst I also realise that in order for action to be taken (if necessary) the issue needs to be politicised.

The argument that the reason for the seeming growth in support of the human-derived-CO2-global-warming theory amongst scientists is simply because in order to get funding scientists tend to spin their research in order to plug it into the Hot Topic is an interesting one.

A thing that surprises me about scientific endeavour is how much we don't know. The weather is supposed to be immensely chaotic and complex. There might be room for errors.

Most usefully the programme reminded me of the need to retain debate and cool-headedness even in the face of going against common opinion.

As a techno-progressive sort of person I know that I desperately want to be told that the increase in temperatures is not directly or substantially due to the industrial actions of the human species, and I know I might be biased towards the sort of arguments Durkin uses, but I'm still confident that the solutions to most of the problems we are facing (as well as peak oil) is to advance technology, and be proactive.

More interesting is the response to Durkin's documentary amongst the press. Sp!ked-online managed, in their own inimical way, to align themselves with my feelings on the matter (follow the Sp!ked link to see what other people have been saying as well).

Another good point is that between 1945 and 1975 the global temperature dropped rather a lot. This lead people to believe that a new ice-age was coming and that London would be crushed by glaciers. Interesting stuff.

At the moment my feelings are summed up rather neatly by this cartoon from the excellent xkcd.com. Anyway I have no doubt I will continue to obsessively turn out all standby appliances in the house, annoy others by unplugging charging mobile phones, fidget when the bus I'm on is in a traffic jam, and feel guilty every time I eat beef (I'll also continue to turn off electrical socket switches that aren't in use - but I doubt that will have any effect whatsoever).

More Goodness from the Edge Question

Months after it was first published I am still digesting the content of the essays in Edge.org's question of 2007. If there is a single document I would advise everyone to read on the Internet it would be this.

One of Jaron Lanier's comments concerns the ability of the human mind to learn to control bodies that are very different from the ones we currently wear. This idea is called homuncular flexibility. From Edge.org:

Some of the most interesting data from VR research thus far involve Homuncular Flexibility. It turns out that the human brain can learn to control radically different bodies with remarkable ease. That means that people might eventually learn to spontaneously change what's going on in a virtual world by becoming parts of it.

This may result in scenarios similar to those described in Greg Bear's sublime Eon, in which posthumans communicate using an elaborate set of VR "picts" to supplement traditional, linear speech.

More information on Jaron Lanier's ideas of homuncular flexibility can be found here in last years Edge.org question (What's your Dangerous Idea?).

Stewart Brand and Nuclear Power

It is wonderful to see someone talking sense about nuclear power, and someone as potentially influential and credible as Stewart Brand. From the New York Times:

“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

He also goes on to comment on something that I've always felt was a great problem with the environmentalist group:

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.

“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

The Earth is a finite resource, but as things are at the moment we can't remove our cities without displacing billions of people. We can't uproot our infrastructure without loss of life and loss of quality of life.

Putting a vague abstract of an untainted Earth before the health, wellbeing and happiness of everyone already living on Earth has been a problem for the environmentalists. It may even have contributed to the length of time it took for politicians and businesspeople to treat the environment as a serious issue.

That's not to belittle the tremendous strides the environmentalist-faction have managed to accomplish over the past several decades, but it is only by embracing technologies like nuclear power, genetic engineering and cheap manufacturing that we will be able to solve our current problems of global warming.

Edge Prospect

Listening to Andrew Marr's Start the Week on Radio 4 this morning I heard discussion of Prospect Magazine's recent "Big Question" survey of intellectuals and thinkers. From Prospect's website:

"Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse."

Aside from the fact that I don't really understand the cause of pessimism amongst intellectuals, this is an interesting question, so I'll have a hash at it myself.

I would say that the 20th century was defined in terms of a continuing transition from barbarism to civilization. The corrections being made to our behaviour as individuals and as a larger social group can be characterised in two ways:

• The extent to which objects can be considered private property, with anarcho-capitalists at one end (in such a society everything and anyone could be owned), and anarcho-socialists at the other (in such a society everything would be held as commons).
• The extent to which the state controls the affairs of individuals, including the level of taxes and laws.
  

So that has defined what they mean by left and right. I think the 21st century will see these themes continue in a slightly modified fashion. I think one of the biggest issues of the coming century will be that of the freedom of personal augmentation and alteration. This will probably come to mirror the right/left aspect of the 20th century. There will be discussion over the issue of whether or not implants can be considered "part" of a person, whether uploads of people can inherit their original's property, as well as arguments over AI.

As to Muslim extremism and other forms of religious extremism I have a couple of things to say:

• It remains doubtful if, in the grand scheme of things, the current movement towards fundamentalism will arrive at much. It would be wonderful if a great wave of fundamentalist Muslim intellectuals could create a democratic-faith-government in the Middle East, but this probably won't happen with ourselves and the USA stirring the melting pot.
• It is worth remembering the anarchist movement of a century ago. They terrified the establishment, however their greatest mark on history was initiating the First World War through the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This was huge, of course, but all anyone really remembers about the anarchists who assassinated him are vague bits of unrealistic dogma. So, these small, sad, groups of people who were attacking what they saw as an unfair global hegemony, who were not afraid of sacrificing themselves in the process, but nevertheless (completely unintentionally) started a global conflict between far greater powers. Sound familiar?
  

Over the 18th and 19th centuries human civilization went through enormous economic and social change. Liberalism was invented, the concept of the free market was, the idea of individual liberties was invented. These developments were a correction against things like slavery, tyranny, monarchs, and empires.

Liberalism and the free market were not universally good things though. The laissez-faire attitudes prevalent in Britain between about 1830 and 1860 were shocking in the mistreatment of workers. In the same ways that new concepts were invented during the Age of Enlightenment to correct for the problems of the Dark Ages, things like socialism were invented during the 19th century and developed into the 20th century. These ideas include that of state education, state-funded welfare, the NHS, and communism. These developments were a correction against things like mistreatment of workers by factory-owners, people living in poor conditions, poverty, epidemics due to poor drainage and water supply etc.

The sine-wave of Confucius' "pendulum of history" swings back and forth as ever. However in decreasing amplitudes. The 20th century was characterised by the sudden and shocking discovery that it is not quite as fun to go out and attack your enemies if you're both armed with machine guns.

Communism was pretty unpleasant. American-style free market capitalism is alright as long as you're on top of the pile (the same is true of Communism though). The best place to live in the world today (at least as defined bywishy -washy European pinko liberals) is Scandinavia. There there is a mix of capitalist systems coupled with massive government spending.

I believe that if there is ever to be a great, global system of governance it will follow the Scandinavian model. There will be those who have a predilection for competition and seek to succeed. That is well and good and healthy. There will be those who would rather live off their government-paid-for birthrights, and that is alright too.

As manufacturing costs decrease, and as more and more of industry becomes automated, we will have surplus wealthy in abundance.

At this point an environmentalist will say: "but hang on, our industry is what has caused global warming! We can't continue consuming as we are, because the planet can't support us without environmental collapse, either through global warming or one or two of any number of factors that limit the extent to which we can live."

Richard Branson was recently criticised on Alternet for his presumption in assuming that there can be a technological "quick fix" to global warming. The argument that his x-prize-style contest will lull the public into a false sense of security is laughable. Liberals orcontrarians will never be taken seriously if they insist on treating the vast bulk of the public like complete idiots. Branson is doing his own thing, and instead of being a disgusting capitalist, he is doing something constructive and helpful.

I believe that we can streamline and improve our manufacturing, transport, communication, housing, and power-generating infrastructure to the extent that we can all live as environmentally-neutral individuals. As much as I'd love to slap a command-economy oneveryone via my new global government I know this is impractical and probably not even that effective a solution to out current problem.

Emergent order theories, and the invisible hand of the market, are powerful tools in effective resource allocation. However a tool is useless without someone to use it. We need a powerful external body to correct for problems in the free market, like a state.

Everything needs to be aware of individual people, so there need to be checks and balances. In the case of states, these are in the form of democratic votes, in the case of companies, these are in the form of consumer's cash.

Public-limited-companies and limited-companies generally need to stop thinking of state-imposed controls on pollution as state-imposed controls and more as facts of life. Like gravity. You can't be allowed to make money by flying people on planes without wings (even though it would reduce the cost of manufacture) and you can't be allowed to make money by dumping tonnes of dangerous carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (even though it is very profitable). In the first case because the laws of gravity won't allow it, and in the second case because of the guidelines of respect towards others, if these need to be enforced by a state, then so be it.

Wow. Anyway. What I meant to do was bring in a contrast between the Prospect survey and Edge.org's Big Question, which was most recently "what am I optimistic about?" I advise everyone to read and contrast the two texts.

I am optimistic that we will be able to live in a responsible, respectful, way. The best way of accomplishing my desired liberal-quasi-capitalist-anarcho-socialist-secular-humanist-techno-progressive-global society is to carry on as we are. Pushing harder to reduce waste, increase efficiency of transport and industry and invent new technologies to solve the problems.

Transhumanism offers an opportunity to solve these sorts of problems from the bottom (individual humans) up. However I see no reason why we can't accomplish what we need to accomplish on our own.

As was commented on Start the Week. All the indices of deaths due to conflicts, poverty, malnutrition, are looking good. People tend to be pessimistic when things are uncertain. I look forward to the future.

A Moment of Introversion

Of the many seemingly minor things that irritate me out of all proportion to their actual value as irritants, the one that I would have to rank just above mis-typing the word "definitely" as "defiantly" and just under The Daily Mail is the existence of pretentious, self-involved blogs that go on about the readers and their own problems at length and don't ever talk about anything more interesting (like space-habitats).

Bearing this in mind, I apologise for the following posting.

I have recently been applying to university. In the UK (where I live) this involves filling out an online form with the University Careers and Admissions Service (UCAS) with six choices for what degree to do and where to do it. After attending interviews (sometimes) or visits (sometimes) at the unis you have chosen you are given an offer (or not, but I wouldn't know about that... [sorry, sorry...]) and you then have to choose from your offers which one you most want to accept, and one insurance offer.

Generally speaking you put the offers for higher grades as your main offer (assuming you actually want to go to that university) and put a university that offers you a lower grade in your insurance place.

Currently I am deciding whether or not to put Imperial College (AAA) as my first choice or Manchester University (AAB) as my first choice. It is an interesting and not unpleasant problem with which to find oneself.

Nevertheless it is a problem. If anyone actually reads this blog but doesn't comment then I invite you to come forward and state your opinion. It is very rare that I find myself with a dilemma of this sort, and slightly disconcerting, any constructive advice would be most welcome.

Making Electricity

I glanced at this story (my inner pedant requires that I point out that the title "New Energy Source? ... " is inaccurate as what it describes is in fact only a potentially more efficient method of transferring energy - this seems to have produced some confusion in the comments section of the story) a few days ago and didn't think much of it, but it just occurred to me that a practical development of this technology would be pretty revolutionary (except it is relevant because it is precisely, literally, not revolutionary [pardon the godawful pun]).

To summarise: some researchers at the University of California have worked out how to get the Seebeck effect to work in organic molecules. Organic molecules are much cheaper than elements like bismuth and tellerium, which have been the traditional materials used in thermoelectric converters. This raises the possibility of increasing the efficiency of power stations all over. I suppose it could also be relevant to Oceanic Thermal Energy Conversion.

Most electrical power stations in the world are glorified steam engines mated with something that vaguely resembles Pacinotti's dynamo. Heat is produced, either by burning something or sticking a load of uranium in a box and poking it with sticks, this heat melts water, producing steam, the expansion of which turns the rotors of the dynamo, generating voltage.

There's an episode of Futurama where Planet Express HQ suffers a power outage. Professor Farnsworth's response is an indignant "What do you mean no power! We're living in the future!" This is one of those lines that seems silly when you first hear it but becomes amusing much, much later, like when you're reading PhysOrg.com.

Can you imagine the Death Star, Hot Needle of Inquiry, Problem Child or any of our favourite SF spacecraft/BDOs lugging around honking great big magnets to generate electricity?

The point I'm hovering around is that the future is solid-state, at least as far as the naked eye is concerned. Moving components for anything that doesn't need to move (i.e. where the object of energy expenditure is to move something e.g. in transport) is inefficient, and mechanical motion should be restricted to the smallest possible scale (i.e. molecular nanotechnology). BAM call me on that if there is some problem with this reasoning.

Majumdar, who is also a faculty scientist in materials science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said the field of organic thermoelectricity could open doors to a new, inexpensive source of energy. "The use of inexpensive organic molecules and metal nanoparticles offers the promise of low-cost, plastic-like power generators and refrigerators," he said.

In other words an alternative to the centralised, centrally controlled, and heavy-duty infrastructure we currently rely upon for electrical power. It's already happening with communications (although the Internet is no MANET yet, but one day...), and could happen with power generation with this and distributed generation technologies.

I apologise for over-hyping and ver-speculating about a seemingly minor, but potentially remarkable, breakthrough, but all this talk of throwing off the shackles of the state and living in self-dependent bliss brings out the crazy, survivalist, white-trash, libertarian, moisture-farmer in me (the one who gets Spider Jerusalem [adjective] all over the inner pedant).

Converting heat directly into electricity would make electricity-generation much more effective and efficient. It makes sense.

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.