Space, Global Warming, and Technology

Sorry I haven't written anything for a while. As I mentioned before I've spent most of the past few weeks doing exams, revising for exams, and dealing with the usual stresses that accompany these activities.

As always, an awful lot of stuff has happened over the last few days. Gordon Brown got to be Prime Minister. I'm looking forward to seeing what he'll do.

NASA is planning to launch a spacecraft called Dawn this July to study the asteroids Vesta and Ceres. When it comes to space development asteroids are the first logical source of real cash. They are large reserves of useful materials and aren't sitting at the bottom of massive gravitational wells, like most of the useful material in the solar system.

Charles Stross recently blogged a long and interesting article on space exploration and the economic difficulties of delivering cans of apes to distant star systems. I suppose we can only assume that when human civilization starts to really affect matter beyond our immediate solar system it will be through star-wisp style probes, rather than massive generation-ships, as Stephen Baxter imagines in this month's edition of Focus Magazine.

The star-wisps would carry a small payload that would be capable of "bootstrapping" itself to a more useful state using energy and material it would find when it arrives at its destination star system.

Stross makes a very good point that living in space (even in habitats like O'Neill cylinders) will probably be as difficult and uncomfortable as living on oil rigs or in the Arctic or in the Gobi Desert.

I think it's fair to say that when and if civilization begins to have a large material impact on the solar system it will not be through homo-sapiens living in bottles. It will be through artificial machines controlled by homo-sapiens living in comfort on Earth.

Global warming: From my point of view, I don't mind (in fact I would welcome) giving up personal automobile transport, but cheap international flights is one area where I feel resentful of the necessary sacrifice. A recent article at Physorg suggests the development of an electric plane. I can only assume from the article that it does not refer to an electrical jet engine, but rather to an old-fashioned propeller.


This is disappointing: currently I think the best possibility for have your cake and eat it air travel is alternative fuels, like Richard Branson has been plugging recently.

There is also the wonderful Smartfish project. The sketches of the plane look wonderful.

As for cars, driving on today's roads is an affront to the dignity of man. A sensible, low-cost/free, integrated, information-saturated and nationalised public-transport service is a necessary component of any developed nation seeking to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

I'm still cynical of hydrogen-gas as an alternative fuel. It seems wasteful to produce electricity to electrolyse water to produce hydrogen (assuming you don't use fossil fuels), transport the hydrogen, and then use the hydrogen to power a car or bus. It would be simpler to generate electricity and use it to charge a more conventional battery or super capacitor. There's a fascinating story on Wired about the Tesla electric sports car.

With the current hype surrounding Web 2.0 (Twitter, for example, which I have failed to use and will probably remove if it doesn't become more interesting) there have been a number of articles on the future, and how you predict it. This fascinating article on Slate about the future of the computer is an example. For all the recent advances in computer technology and communications technology we haven't even started to scratch the surface of how these two areas will transform our lives.

As computational devices ooze into the background and interfaces become more intuitive and ubiquitous (for example, Microsoft Surface) the potential for Black Swan events will increase.

All this makes predicting exactly what life will be like in the future difficult. An interesting book Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village by academic Richard Barbrook suggests that our ideas of imminent utopia have more to do with Cold War spin than any realistic analysis of potential future technology.

My own feeling is that the world is likely to get better for everyone over the next century, even as we find new and ever more cunning ways of making ourselves miserable. I suspect that at some point over the next 50 years the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, like the Sudan, Namibia, and others will experience an enormous surge in quality of life, which will make things better for everyone. Global Warming is just crammed with potential Black Swans.

I read an inordinate quantity of science fiction. I've never been able to identify precisely what I like about it: it's probably to do with the mix of optimistic escapism and extraordinary ideas.

Another interesting component is looking at what people in the past thought the future was going to be like. It seems to me that we here in Britain started the 20th century with the spectre of a European War between colonial powers hovering over our heads.

Following several decades of predicted global catastrophe (WWI, WWII, the Great Depression, the rise of dictatorships of various flavours, the creation of atom bombs and the start of the Cold War) people turned to science and technology to create a bright new future.

After this there came various waves of science fiction, dealing mostly with how people felt at the time of writing. Now that the future seems bleak again, with global warming, climate change, peak oil, and all the usual problems of Getting Along, it will be interesting to see how our view of the future changes.

With regard to this, Henry Jenkins writes about how this change in our perception of the future has affected science fiction.

I can't wait for it to be the future!

Apologies for Absence

Sorry I haven't said anything for a while. I have my A-level exams coming up over the next 14 days. I will of course write lengthy analysis of everything that has happened since I last blogged once I no longer have to revise.

This will likely include but is not limited to: the London 1212 Olympics Logo, Twitter and associated Web 2.0 bunkum and the history of dynamos, Craig Venter, Johann Hari, Microsoft Surface, Polly Toynbee, driving, exams, Tony Blair and New Labour, The Week and Felix Dennis, book reviews, the harmonic form, the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, nuclear submarines, martinis, black swans and wealthy Indians.

See you on the 26th of June.

Digital Nomads

A fascinating article here about a couple that travel all over the World in an orange camper-van to create accurate, digital maps for GPS devices. This is the kind of amazing job that would not have been thought of ten years ago.

It is also similar to what this gentleman is doing, Ulenaers and Vanlaar are being paid to document their whereabouts. Elahi is recording his whereabouts and regularly photographing his day-to-day experiences in order to persuade the FBI that he is not a terrorist.

Lifelogs then, are presumably going to be The New New Thing after online social networking has become normal.

In a completely unrelated story: an orangutan has escaped from a zoo in Taiwan! There's video footage. Please watch.

My God, it's full of stars...

...but in one trillion (a million millions, or a thousand billions) years time (alien) astronomers won't be able to see much beyond our own local galaxy, according to this interesting article from PhysOrg.com.

As time goes on, and the universe continues to expand much of the evidence that lead to our own conclusion that the universe began about 13 billion years ago in a Big Bang will become undetectable. From the hypothetical point of view of our hypothetical astronomers the universe will appear static.

The article notes that this could mean that there are crucial things about our own universe that we don't know about.

I've always found this aspect of science, that there are probably huge, fundamental and profound unanswered questions that we don't even know we should be asking. It seems every generation or so someone says "we basically know everything, we just need to fill in the details" then something turns up that changes everything.

I'm rather looking forward to the next time such an event occurs.

Interesting news from The War on Viruses: a new sort of software that analyses potential viruses on the basis of their predicted behaviour, rather than from the software's memory of what viruses look like.

It is reassuring that the conflict between virus-makers and antivirus software-makers has resulted in an essential standstill, or equilibrium. I have never experienced a particularly destructive, targeted virus, so I can only assume that the viruses are being held at bay.

Hooray for superconducting electric motors, coming (in a long while) to a Prius near you.

Today in Technology

It really is wonderful to be living in whatever this era is: a casual browse through the news today suggests many hopeful advances, and some rather worrying (but utterly predictable) developments.

As to the former we have the world's first "tiny implantable biocomputers". These are very similar to something Eric Drexler describes in Engines of Creation: tiny autonomous robots that manipulate the interiors of cells for medical purposes.

I've read quite a lot about this sort of idea, and it is sometimes difficult to separate fact from speculation. I wonder how Drexler's ideas of "tiny nanotechnological robots that allow us to live forever" will actually be instantiated in the real world.

Anyway, this new development looks like another concrete step towards the medical revolution.

In other news, it was only a matter of time before some bright spark thought of this. Attaching cameras to toy-helicopters is fairly middle-of-the-road near future SF, and I'm surprised it hasn't already happened (I've always had a guilty sense that it is worthwhile this sort of thing happening just for the slight thrill of realising that you're living in a cool cyberpunk-ish world, but what cyberpunk and SF often fails to get across is how rapidly such things become mundane, irritating, and a damned infringement on our civil liberties).

I'm fortunate enough to live in a fairly low-crime area, but nevertheless a friend of mine was beaten up the other night. As often is the case, it wasn't quite a mugging, but occupied the kind of frustrating grey-area of mindless intimidation and spontaneous violence that ASBOs are meant to target.

Antisocial behaviour is an interesting problem: by which I mean it's one that I can't see a solution to and have always had the luxury of not having to worry about. I instinctively feel that politicians should concentrate on the causes of antisocial behaviour, but I don't really know what they are, or what we'd have to sacrifice to remove the cause.

I can empathise with people who want to see something concrete done quickly to deal with the problems of young men like myself making life unpleasant for these people, but I can also see that there must be some deeper cause. Perhaps if the legal age at which you can purchase alcohol in pubs was lowered to 13 then there would be less of a problem with young people hanging around on street corners.

Anyway, back to technology, and this article(2) in The Times, which claims parents are starting to spy on their children through their kid's social networking pages. I'm not sure why it is "spying" when your parent does it (as opposed to some anonymous figure from another country).

A point is made in another article that my generation are leaving behind an "indelible electronic" trail of images and comments we may come to regret in later life. I can think of only a couple of pictures that might cause me some embarrassment, and they appear to have dropped out of the public view on the web, and in any case neither are particularly horrific.

I suppose that we will have to adapt to having every aspect of our lives recorded in hi-def, 7.1 surround sound, smell-0-vision, tagged to a precise date and global location. Charles Stross has written an article on this topic, containing the usual raft of brain-zapping insights and ideas.

It is interesting how rapidly the reality of George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has come around and become mundane, and how much more complicated the reality actually is. The real world generally seems to be more complex and more boring than fantasy.

This is an interesting trick to pull off.

Technological Senses

A very cyberpunk/Sterling/Stephenson/Gibson-esque article at Wired Magazine here. The article explores how people can develop "artificial senses" with the aid of synthetic devices. From the article:

"Figure out how to change the sensory data you want — the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared — into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it's time to build them."

This short-cut removes the tedious necessity of developing extremely complex "neural interfaces". Something very similar to this concept is explored in Greg Egan's Teranesia (excellent, like all of Egan's work that I've read), in which a blind character develops a sense of sight via a mat-like haptic interface on his back.

In the book, a camera feeds input to the mat to generate an image using the tiny lumps on the surface of the mat. The blind man gradually learns to interpret this input as visual information.

Anyway, it's wonderful to see this sort of thing happening in the real world.

What is means to be a Humanist

I’ve been reading Humanism by H.J. Blackham. It is a “Pelican Original” published in 1968. I suppose it is the equivalent to the X for Dummies genre today – a short, casual read to give you a basic understanding of a subject.

The basic precepts of humanism, according to this book, are that “man is on his own and this life is all” and that “there is an assumption of responsibility for one’s own life and for the life of all mankind.” I strongly advise that anyone reading this acquire the book (unfortunately published in the era before ISBNs) and read it. The ideas the whole concept of humanism raises are fascinating, even if you have no interest in coming to consider yourself a humanist.

As I drop in and out of the book, reading a few pages here, then coming back to reread them, it occurs to me how profoundly our society would change if the fundamental precepts of humanism were more generally accepted.

Every so often the implications of humanism hit me. Iain M. Banks refers to this experience as “swim”, in his book The Algebraist. Ken MacLeod mentions the experience on a number of occasions, most notably in Learning the World and his most recent work Execution Channel. For me the feeling often, but not always, begins with a sudden rush of blood to the head, usually after standing up too suddenly after having been sat down for some time.

The experience lacks any of the notable features of a divine experience. There is sometimes a feeling of intoxication, even of euphoria. The key insight that is granted by this experience, this “swim”, is not new knowledge, but rather a casting aside of the assumptions we make so much a part of our lives that we would find it very difficult to live without them.

As far as I know, it is impossible to induce this state. It will generally only arise when you do not suspect that it will. I don’t know if expectation precludes it, because I’ve never been expecting it when it happens.

The insight? You realise that you are who you are. I realise (like Popeye) I am what I am. The little homunculus I carry in my mind, my self-image, is an utter fiction. I am Tom James, I live in a small town, and I go to school. I’ve never been to any of the places I see on the news regularly. I have never met the vast majority of people in the world. I exist.

It sounds profound, but it isn’t. It is the opposite of profound. It isn’t about being at one with the Universe. It is the brief, momentary understanding that, despite all your fantasies and abstract, unsubstantial problems you exist within the Universe. And you are alone.

The Christian dictum: “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself” is a fair basis for morality. But when you truly reject the existence of God, gods, a supreme, all-powerful force controlling everything a lot of rather unpleasant thoughts emerge.

The moral of the nice story about the poor woman who anonymously gives a small but, to her, significant amount of money to the charity and the rich man who boastfully gives a much larger but, to him, less significant quantity of money falls flat. As boorish as the man is, once you reject the idea of heavenly pixie-points, he becomes the person who has accomplished more, has alleviated more suffering in his act of charity.

“Do unto others…” becomes the basis of all morality, once you reject the whole idea of there being some kind of “natural morality” that emerges from the way things are.

Indulging in a humanist mindset has made me more apolitical. I know that people should be afforded life, liberty, and the happiness of pursuit. I know that equality, freedom and society are important. I know that the strong should help the weak. But I’ve also come to realise that all these ideologies, important though they are, are very much secondary to the basic rule of ensuring everyone is as happy as they can be.

From this angle the daily grind of politics in Westminster becomes more a point of picking a team for tribalistic reasons. I vote Labour or Liberal Democrat mostly because their basic ideologies reflect, in some way, the way I think the whole world should be run: economic growth and wealth-generation without exploiting the poorest. Freedom balanced against justice and self-fulfilment balanced against responsibility.

Being humanist, for me, means removing all the words and ideologies and concentrating on action and what people are actually doing. It means actually trying to imagine how the people who suffer so that I don’t have to actually feel. It means very little as far as politics is concerned, but it means a lot to how I see the world. We’re all alone, and we’re all aware, on some level (even that of flat denial), that this is it. We’ll maintain state-integrity for a couple of gigaseconds if we’re lucky and then whatever construct believes itself to be Tom James will have gone.

Still, this is the only life I'll ever have. So now, after dispensing this vague but heartfelt essay to the howling wastes of the consumer-content revolution, I will take my leave and go and find some other worthwhile activity with which to fill my day.

Providence and Black Swans

This article from The Guardian mentions Felix Dennis’ book How to Get Rich. At some point in HtGR Dennis quotes Goethe (according to some website I looked at, this quote may not be attributable to Goethe):

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

This is similar to the “Black Swan Theory” explored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who also contributes to Edge.org here. Taleb argues that random and utterly unexpected and unexpectable events like 9/11 are occurring with greater frequency because their frequency, number, and effect are amplified by the networked and highly technological world we now live in. From Edge:

Against what one might expect, this makes me extremely optimistic about the future in several selective research-oriented domains, those in which there is an asymmetry in outcomes favouring the positive over the negative — like evolution. These domains thrive on randomness. The higher the uncertainty in such environments, the rosier the future — since we only select what works and discard the rest. With unplanned discoveries, you pick what's best; as with a financial option, you do not have any obligation to take what you do not like. Rigorous reasoning applies less to the planning than to the selection of what works. I also call these discoveries positive "Black Swans": you can't predict them but you know where they can come from and you know how they will affect you. My optimism in these domains comes from both the continuous increase in the rate of trial and error and the increase in uncertainty and general unpredictability.

I am convinced that the future of America is rosier than people claim — I've been hearing about its imminent decline ever since I started reading. Take the following puzzle. Whenever you hear or read a snotty European presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as "uncultured", "unintellectual" and "poor in math" because, unlike his peers, they are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows people call "high culture". Yet the person making these statements will be likely to be addicted to his Ipod, wearing t-shirts and blue jeans, and using Microsoft Word to jot down his "cultural" statements on his (Intel) PC, with some Google searches on the Internet here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happened that the U.S. is currently far, far more tinkering an environment than that of these nations of museum goers and equation solvers — in spite of the perceived weakness of the educational system, which allows the bottom-up uncertainty-driven trial-and-error system to govern it, whether in technology or in business.

It fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional and theoretical studies is where it very strength lies — it produces "doers", Black Swan hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, or others with a tolerance for risk-taking which attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners. And globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable and fat-tailed part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable and more linear components and assign them to someone in more mathematical and "cultural" states happy to be paid by the hour and work on other people's ideas. (I hold, against the current Adam Smith-style discourse in economics, that the American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows to capture the randomness of the environment — "cheap options"— not much because of competition and certainly less because of material incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith, nor to some extent, those of Karl Marx, seem to be conscious about the role of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style causation and cannot separate skills and payoffs.)

I like this point of view. I have great plans for the future, but I they aren’t currently too specific. Obviously I’ll need to write up a sober business plan, but as long as I keep my wits about me I should be able to spot potential Black Swans when they occur. Felix Dennis mentions “the search” in his book. This corresponds, I suppose, to the time when you try to sensitise yourself to BSE (lol) and leap in when you find something useful. This must also be the reason that large corporations and governments engage in “blue sky research”, and Google employees dedicate 1/5 of their time to personal projects.

All the while institutional science is largely driven by causal certainties, or the illusion of the ability to grasp these certainties; stochastic tinkering does not have easy acceptance. Yet we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing — thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system. I am also optimistic that the academy is losing its power and ability to put knowledge in straightjackets and more out-of-the-box knowledge will be generated Wiki-style. But what I am saying is not totally new. Accepting that technological improvement is an undirected (and unpredictable) stochastic process was the agenda of an almost unknown branch of Hellenic medicine in the second century Mediterranean Near East called the "empirics". Its best known practitioners were Menodotus of Nicomedia and my hero of heroes Sextus Empiricus. They advocated theory-free opinion-free trial-and-error, literally stochastic medicine. Their voices were drowned by the theoretically driven Galenic, and later Arab-Aristotelian medicine that prevailed until recently.

This idea applies to so many other technological domains. The only bad news is that we can't really tell where the good news is going to be about, except that we can locate it in specific locations, those with a high number of trials. More tinkering equals more Black Swans. Go look for the tinkerers.

I like the idea of opinion-free science. It also strikes me that from an investment point of view, I wonder if taking a million dollars and investing in a thousand companies would be better than simply investing in one company. If you had even one Microsoft to start off with, and a few 3663’s and other success-stories, would you achieve greater growth in wealth than if you invested in an ISA account?

Humanism

I’ve been reading Humanism by H.J. Blackham. It is fairly good. The book claims that the basic message of humanism is that “this life is all we’ll ever have, and that we are alone as individuals”. There’s an interesting, if somewhat rambling article on humanism in The Times today. There was also an article on smart drugs or “nootropics”. It is interesting to see discussion of humanism juxtaposed with a discussion of what might be the early glimmerings of advancement in transhumanism.

SF-esque NASA Film

Virtual Mice Brains

Just as a series of articles(2) in various papers concerning the (un)likelihood of AI robots had left me feeling sorry that I might never live to have my skull split open and an exact replica of my mind and CNS instantiated on a supercomputer some wonderful news from researchers at IBM has shown that there is hope on the horizon.

The researchers have created a "simulation of a cortical network with the size, link complexity and signal activity of a mouse brain, but without the structure". So we know now that there is certainly no theoretical reason why a mouse brain couldn't by instantiated within a synthetic computer.

The next obvious step, presumably, is to find some way of scanning the brain of a mouse or similar creature so that we can create a virtual mouse brain. Here's a pdf write-up of the experiment.

According to the article at Open the Future by comparing the complexity of a human brain to that of a mouse we see that if Moore's Law continues we will be looking at hardware capable of running human minds within 20 years or so.

The Dependency Principle

The dependency principle is an idea borrowed from Iain M. Banks' novels about the Culture. The Culture are anarchistic socialists. Their technologies allow for distributed manufacturing and a lack of scarcity.

The closest thing the Culture has to a ruling class are the superhuman "Minds" that control the numerous habitats, ships, and other infrastructure that underpins the Culture's advanced civilization.

The Minds spend a lot of their time in abstract, mathematical, pondering. They refer to the "idea space" they conjure in their imaginations as "infinite fun space". Infinite fun space is, as the name suggests, fun. Minds can lose themselves in the sheer beauty of their own imaginings.

And here the dependency principle becomes important. You can have the most marvelous virtual world imaginable, but the crucial point to remember is that it is a virtual world and is reliant on real hardware.

Something similar to the dependency principle needs to applied to civilization. Many of the things people associate most intimately with "civilization" are not, in fact, the things that are most important.

The States, the Laws, the written language, the libraries and Churches, and shops and banks - all these owe their existence to something more basic. What many of us imagine to be the yardstick of civilized societies are in fact ephemeral concepts emerging from a deeper layer of stuff (not that they are worth any less for it).

This, to paraphrase Morpheus in The Matrix, is the world that has been pulled over our eyes. As recent events in Australia have shown, the undoing of all of our wonderful structures of the mind can be something as simple as a drought. The drought damages our subsistence agriculture, and this problem gradually permeates up through the layers of our society.

If the terrible things happening in Australia were to happen worldwide, as many believe is a possibility, it would mean a drastic downsizing for our civilization. It is difficult to predict precisely what effect this would have on individuals.

A lecturer I met when I went to Manchester University's open day commented that grain is fundamental to civilization. Without grain for bread, and food for meat-animals, we could not live as we do.

Another obvious example is oil. Oil permeates every corner of our society and technical civilization. The plastics in the keyboard I am typing on will have been derived from oil. The power for the electricity that is running this PC probably came from oil or gas. Everything comes back to oil. And oil is a limited resource.

It is necessary to use our current oil-wealth to bootstrap ourselves to another level of existence. This does not mean changing any laws or states or companies. It means changing the underlying fabric of our lives, consciously deciding to change the parts of the engine that powers our civilization.

Predictions for 2100

There is a fascinating set of predictions I read, via boingboing, concerning the year 2000, originally published in the year 1900 in The Ladies Home Journal. It is interesting to see what they got wrong and what they got right. That Nicaragua, Mexico and Brazil would ask to join the USA seems a little strange now, but I don’t know the politics of the time.

I like the sound of delivering mail by pneumatic tube, though this has been made redundant by electronic communication. There is also the usual nineteenth century obsession with the “iron cavalry”. I think the way the Victorian-era intelligentsia saw “war in the air” and “the iron cavalry” in a way similar to how we see “nanotechnological grey goo” and “wirehead meat-puppets”.

I have decided to write my own list. It is inspired by the article from the December 1900 issue of The Ladies Home Journal and is based on what little I know of current developments in science and technology. I have tried to capture the same certainty and enthusiasm of the writer of that article (a Mr Watkins) when I write of the developments in fields similar to those described in The Ladies Home Journal. Enjoy:

These prophecies are based on my own thoughts and on what I have read:

Prediction #1: The population of the Earth will exceed 10 billion by the end of the 21^st century. The primary axes of political power will have shifted away from the USA. China, Malaysia, India, Russia, the EU, and a powerful “African Union” will be important global players. A social problem in the EU and Japan will be an absence of young people. The loss of oil to the Middle East will not have reduced the region’s importance in global affairs, as the meeting place of the EU, Africa, and Asia, but it remains a battle ground, rather than anywhere anyone would actually want to live. There will be more than a million people in space, in near Earth orbit, the Lagrange points, and on the Moon. The industrial exploitation of the asteroids and comets will have started, and there will be permanent colonies on Mars. Human beings will have walked on Europa (one of the moons of Jupiter).

Prediction #2: The average human being will have much greater personal choice about their appearance, intelligence, skill-set, mood, strengths, and lifestyle. Advances in cyborg technology, molecular nanotechnology, genetic engineering, neurosurgery, nootropics, and biomedical engineering will allow people to purchase personal body- and neural-upgrades. Global life expectancy will be well into the 100’s, and may be pushing 200. At some point before 2100 the majority of new children will be born via artificial methods. It will be normal to have regular and frequent back-ups of a person’s neural structures to insure against sudden, accidental death.

Prediction #3: Education will be considered a public commons, given free of charge as an inalienable human right to everyone. With improved understanding of individual psychologies, nootropics (“smart drugs”) and neural augmentation people will be able to learn more, remember more, and train faster. It will be possible to “download” different skill-sets depending on what it is you have to do. Actual work may be much closer to what we today would see as “fun”. The barrier between work and play will have almost disappeared. Access to a fairly luxurious lifestyle, with access to a certain amount of power, computing-resources, clothes, accommodation, education, information, and sustenance will also be seen as an inalienable right. Lotus-eating is frowned upon by most, and those that perform the essential and important jobs are respected, and even envied, for their importance.

Prediction #4: Transport will have become heavily integrated, with no clear distinction given between “aircraft”, “ship”, “car” or “train”. A small pod about the size of a 20^th century luxury sedan, immersed within a utility-fog-style gel, will automatically transport anyone wherever they wish to go on the surface of the Earth. If they want to travel a short distance the pod will be impelled through a translucent gel that will cover most of the roads and motorways. For intra-continental distances the pod will be transferred to a maglev-style railway system. For crossing between continents the pod will rendezvous with and attach to diamantine, solar-powered airships (for a relaxing cruise), or to hypersonic jet-aircraft for a faster transfer. Despite this level of integration, there is no all-controlling system that instructs each pod on how most efficiently to travel, rather the order is emergent from the actions of individual pod AI-systems.

Prediction #5: The crisis in power-sources will have been resolved by a combination of things. Machinery will have become more efficient generally, through the widespread application of molecular nanotechnology to the manufacture of materials, and in more subtle methods of cleaning clothes and houses, and transporting people. Nuclear fission will have been used “to plug the gap” between the end of fossil-fuel-based power generation and the start of extensive nanotechnological solar-based power generation and nuclear fission. Areas where nuclear waste has been stored have, ironically, become nature reserves.

Prediction #6: Valuable materials and substances will be manufactured by plant-like organisms/devices that are farmed similarly to how crops are farmed today. These plant-like organisms/devices will be a combination of the organic and the artificial, and will produce already-refined products for use in industry and at home.

Prediction #7: Over the course of the 21^st century runaway military-industrial complexes will have created horrific weapons. “Wireheaded” troops will have been used by military dictators and others. These soldiers will have drug-drips and electrical charge-generators installed in their brains so that they are supernaturally loyal to their commanders. High precision manufacture of poisons and biological viruses will mean the threat of “biological terrorism” remains as high as ever. With increased general use of molecular nanotechnology, “viruses” will be designed to target nanotechnological infrastructure. These viruses will be a combination of biological viruses and computer viruses. By the end of the 21^st century it will have become much easier for a small group to exert influence and control over the majority. “Meme warfare” (propaganda) will become increasingly important, as how a conflict appears to the public becomes nearly as important as the conflict itself.

Prediction #8: Several space elevators will have been built. One will have its base in Malaysia, another will have its base in equatorial Africa, and another will have its base in South America. These areas will become increasingly important economically and politically as they offer the easiest access to space. Meanwhile extremely light, safe, and efficient laser-launched spacecraft will have been built and used. These will compete with the space elevators for spacebound traffic.

Prediction #9: Surveillance will have become almost total. Because of a plethora of extremely cheap, extremely small, and extremely versatile sensory devices, including cameras, artificial olfactory sensors, and “smart dust”, privacy will have become an extremely valuable commodity. Many people will barricade their homes against outside intrusion. Some people will embrace the all-seeing panopticon, and others will campaign vigorously against it. Panopticonism and antipanopticonism will become key political standpoints. The panopticon is not created solely by any one state, but is rather composed of many overlapping interests. Businesses and corporations seek to understand the behaviour of consumers more accurately. Neighbourhood-watch groups and vigilantes, private detectives, jealous lovers, concerned parents, employers, employees, government workers, journalists, and voyeurs will all contribute to the mass of observation devices.

Prediction #10: More manufacturing will be done at the local level. Distant descendants of today’s 3D printers and CAM machines will have developed to the point where anyone with a blueprint, a computer, a source of power, and a gas-supply can build anything they want. These devices will be able to manufacture food and drink, artificial organs, drugs, tools, bicycles, books, and even whole living organisms, including people. Initially there will be several different devices that produce different types of product, but towards the end of the 21^st century these will all be combined into one device. A lot of manufacturing will still occur in relatively centralised factories, but these will be much closer to the consumer than before, as manufacturing will have been made more efficient and less bad for the environment. These facilities will more closely resemble organic forests than artificial factories as we know them today. The plant-like organisms/devices will also contribute a lot to the needs of industry and individuals. The lines between agriculture, manufacturing, and refining will be blurred. There will be certain items, like very large quantities of materials, products requiring exotic isotopes, and potentially dangerous devices, that will still be produced in manufacturing facilities a long way from human habitation.

Prediction #11: Biological diseases and pests will have become less prominent, but as I mentioned earlier there are still terrorists who sometimes purposefully release harmful materials into the technosphere. Many of these are harmless or annoying, like spam-email today. Others are more potentially harmful, but can generally be avoided through good sense, like phishing emails. There are analogues to today’s computer viruses and today’s biological viruses, there are also hybrid viruses that attack the neural implants and artificial organs people use. Many people are forced to maintain an artificial immune-system on top of their natural defences, and a computational firewall on top of that.

Prediction #12: At least one permanent space-based human colony will have been created, hollowed out of asteroidal rock. This colony will be powered by vast sheets of cheaply-manufactured solar collectors. The colony will be independent and self-sufficient. “Space lanes” will be mapped across the solar system. These are regions in space that are particularly conducive to the transport of people (as most goods are manufactured on site) due to the interaction of gravitational fields. These space lanes are dynamic and constantly shifting as the planets orbit the Sun.

Prediction # 13: Small probes, propelled through space by reflective sails and lasers based in the solar system, will have been launched towards Alpha Centauri and a handful of nearby star-systems. Rather than transport large amounts of sensors and bulky communications equipment between stars, the probes are designed to latch on to small asteroids or comets in the destination system. They then manufacture communications infrastructure and larger probes for exploring the destination system. These automatic outposts also serve as observatories, enabling the creation of massive-baseline telescopes when combined with observatories in the home system.

Prediction #14: Extensive use of genetic engineering will lead to the creation of several unique species of artificial animals. These animals will be designed to human specifications. There is some controversy surrounding this practice, as it is argued that the creation of creatures that cannot live healthy lives is cruel. There will be even more controversy surrounding the creation of chimeras, or human-animal hybrids. Some animals will have their intelligence dramatically increased, even to the point where they can converse with people. This will also apply to plants, with many new and colourful species created for a variety of purposes, including in industry (see above).

I have attempted to recreate the tone and attitude of the original text. It will be interesting, if anyone is still reading weblogs in 93 years time, to see wgat they have to say about what will happen in 2200, and precisely how what I've written has been proved off-the-mark, or just wrong

A Materialist Viewpoint

I sometimes think it would be nice to strip away all the ideologies, the seemingly solid sets of mutually contradictory arguments that people latch onto because they provide a framework with which they can define themselves, and a group that they can ally themselves with.

It would be nice if we looked at things from as objective a viewpoint as possible. It is lazy to say that people can never be objective. However it is difficult to be objective, so on this occasion I won’t even try to be objective, but I will try to be sensible.

Call it the materialist viewpoint.

There are six and a half billion people in this world. Each individual is made of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and several other elements. And yet each one is more intricate and wonderful than any of the other things we can see in the universe.

The human brain is the most complex object we have yet discovered. If any one of us were given the choice between meeting Aristotle, Newton, or Shakespeare, and the opportunity to explore an entire lifeless galaxy, it is likely we would choose one of the three human beings over the galaxy.

Of these six and a half billion people many do not have the luxury of being able to consider matters of ethics, philosophy, mathematics, science, art, or culture. They live lives that we would consider to be nasty, brutish, and short.

This simply isn’t acceptable. A recent psychological survey I read claimed people were more ready to feel emotionally about the plight of individuals, rather than simply being told that a certain number of thousands of people had died for whatever reason.

This lack of emotion concerning the many people currently living in poverty may go some way to explaining why something hasn’t been done.

Some claim that western capitalist countries have influenced the global free market, through the IMF and World Bank, in order to protect their own prosperity over that of poorer countries.

I don’t know enough about economics to be able to give an opinion on this. If asked, I would say I enjoy the privilege of living in a liberal western democracy, and I would certainly agree that the state of the state I find myself living in is pretty good and I would agree that it is desirable that this state of affairs continues.

I would have expected, if it were not that I have learnt a little about human nature since I was born, that some system would be devised that would distribute the vast wealth of humanity; including all our knowledge, the resources of the Earth, and our own minds and skills, as widely as possible.

I am given to understand that inequality is rising in the developed world, and is already rampant on a global scale, and has been for centuries. That a few should have proportionally more than the many is a fact that I find very difficult to be angry about. Perhaps a few of those wealthy people did something truly useful that means they earned their fortune, many of them seem to give charitably, if perhaps not as much as I’d like them to.

But the problem is not with a few rich people. The problem is that there are a vast number of people who don’t even enjoy the standard of living I enjoy, with access to reasonable healthcare that I don’t have to pay for immediately, with effective public transport, free education, and a welfare safety net. I am also given the opportunity to do pretty much anything I’m capable of.

I am not advocating a socialist world government. The necessary extent and power of such an institution would invite corruption and mishandling. Applying democracy on a global scale, even with extensive federalisation, would be difficult. With so many diverse concerns and competing interests, no single person could reasonably be elected to a “world senate”, let alone a world presidency.

I am not especially libertarian in outlook. If you read this document closely you will notice that I mention that I consider my political views to be “liberal socialist secular humanist democratic”, roughly in that order of precedence. But again, it is necessary to put aside these tribalistic labels we apply to ourselves and simply consider the basic conditions of humanity.

I dislike pain and hunger; both of the physical, emotional, and mental variety (although I haven’t actually experienced anything I’d describe as mental pain, I suppose mental hunger would be an unsated sense of curiosity). I can model my own behaviour well enough to consider myself, as an entity. I can also model the universe around me and the people within that universe. I can project my own feelings of pain and hunger onto my model of another individual. This allows me to empathise with people.

I find it disagreeable that there are so many people experiencing pain and hunger, and that there does not seem to be any fundamental reason. There is no physical law that prevents everyone from having the chance to lead a long, healthy, and happy life. I also find it disagreeable that all those billions of unhappy people exist in my conscious as only a vague blur. I can’t really identify with any number of people over about three or four at any one time. Beyond that I use abstract tricks to deal with the immensity. Orders of magnitude and logarithms and so on, but you can’t apply a logarithm to human suffering.

It is clear that Something Needs to be Done. I'm not yet sure what It is. I suspect I will know It when I see It. It may be a slightly different way of running the global economy. It might be an invention. It might just be a way of looking at the world. Perhaps the trick is to simply allow things to carry on as they are, but constantly keep nudging events towards more favourable outcomes. It will probably take quite a long time, but I suspect we will get there eventually.

Global Warming Debate

I was interested to read this article in The Guardian on Saturday. The article is probably a spoof. If it is, then the subject does not really need to be satirised. There are some very serious problems with the way global warming is reported and discussed. The fictional writer appears glib and unfeeling of the potential human misery that climate change may cause, but nevertheless makes a few points that are worth considering:

1) "We have reliable weather statistics for only four centuries - far too short a period to make overarching judgments" - this is true. The information is from many different sources and with something like temperature (which changes locally and frequently) there are understandable problems with measurements based on secondary data from several hundred years ago (i.e. before we started measuring temperature directly).

2) "Geological evidence shows there have been violent shifts in the Earth's temperature in the distant past, so man can't be held solely responsible for dramatic changes in life. Scaremongers posit the ideal of a changeless world, but nothing stays the same" - true, but it still possible that humankind produced a small change that was unprecedented, and as such will have unprecedented consequences.

One of the problems with the current global warming debate is the combination of environmentalist ideologies and ideas of serious global warming amelioration. By this I mean whenever someone comes up with more evidence that global warming is happening and is a serious issue, they have to shout over the eschatologists, doom-mongers, green fundamentalists and other riff-raff who pollute the debate.

It is good that politicians are finally taking part in the debate, but it does rather seem that appearing "green" is more of a career move as opposed to a deeply-held conviction (c.f. David Cameron).

Then you have someone like Freeman Dyson, whose credentials as an actual scientist as opposed to a politician or commentator are impeccable. His recent comments on the paucity of real-world, as opposed to computer model, data to support the current "consensus" (not a word we should be comfortable with when concerned with something as potentially problematic as rapid climate change) of anthropogenic global warming.

Dyson could almost be the individual being satirised (I'm sure it is a spoof, [irony] the thought that a quick Google search of the man's purported name, institution, website, and book could yield no result is unthinkable [/irony]). Dyson has a theory of "A Principle of Maximum Diversity". To quote the source:

"My optimism about the long-term survival of life comes mainly from imagining what will happen when life escapes from this planet and becomes adapted to living in vacuum. There is then no real barrier to stop life from spreading through the universe. Hopping from one world to another will be about as easy as hopping from one island in the Pacific to another. And then life will diversify to fill the infinite variety of ecological niches in the universe, as it has done already on this planet."

This ties into my point that once we create a stable, self-sustaining, self-repairing, and (hopefully) benign technosphere it will evolve independently of basic homo-sapiens. It will then spread across the universe, bringing life, wonder, joy and happiness. If and when such a thing does happen it will probably be a little different, but it will still be worth watching.

Dyson goes on to comment on global warming:

"Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are unreliable. They are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behavior in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere."

This seems to be the underlying argument of most people who deny that anthropogenic global warming is a significant factor in the current trend. I am not qualified to comment on any of the issues concerned, but I do so anyway. What other use has blogging?

This issue bugs me because there seems to be so much controversy and politicking surrounding a simple question: "are human activities the cause of global warming?" It has reached the point where I'm less and less confident in expressing any opinion. I'm almost inclined to just sit back and wait for confirmation either way, but that would be lazy and thoughtless.

Maybe one day I'll know enough to know the answer. Sooner or later we'll find out. Right now we need to be concerned for the lives and livelihoods of those who will suffer because the of direct and indirect consequences of this global temperature rise, regardless of whether it is caused by people or not.

Geophysical Warning System

A while ago I mentioned that it would be a good idea to "...build a comprehensive network of subterranean detectors that can warn people in advance of earthquakes and other traumas..." partly because until we build a reasonable space habitat most of us will have to live on the surface of the Earth.

Fortunately it seems someone in on-task to build a solution, at least on the North American continent. The EarthScope project intends to "... track faint tremors, measure crustal deformation and make three-dimensional maps of the earth's interior from crust to core..."

This came to my attention today through an article on BoingBoing concerning a robotic jumping flea. The robotic flea is the next step on the road to Smartdust that will be capable of moving independently, like this.

The concept of "smart dust" is astonishing enough, and is itself likely to develop into "utility fog" style systems.

The fact that this technology will ("will" with the usual requirement that civilization remain intact) become ubiquitous, cheap, and easy to use makes me a little bored with the current surveillance hysteria.

The sad fact is that we're all going to have to give our privacy an uncomfortable and self-aware handshake goodbye when Smartdust becomes an everyday part of life. There will be an enormous market for countermeasures and demands for extensive regulation for this potentially disruptive technology.

Ho-hum. But at least we'll have a geophysical warning system.

Ferrofluid Sculpture and Steven Pinker

This video of a pair of towers manipulating a magnetic fluid into extraordinary and beautiful shapes puts me in mind of how a utility fog construct might look, combining elements of solidity and fluidity in a fractal and hypnotic object.

More optimistic opinions from Steven Pinker, who comments in Edge.org that deaths due to violence as a proportion of deaths overall has been decreasing over the past several decades and centuries.

Nuked-up Chinese Moon Rover

In other news from science, it seems the Chinese are planning on building a nuclear-powered remote-controlled Moon-rover.

It will be interesting to see how the USA and Europe react to the idea of the Chinese government transporting nuclear material into space.

Calorie Restriction

In order to live longer - eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and cut back on the red meat. It is reassuring to know that we won't have to starve ourselves in order to live longer, as researchers are looking for drugs that imitate the positive effects of calorie-restriction, from PhysOrg.com:

"Physiological changes associated with ageing include cell damage and the emergence of cancer cells. The most important effects of low calorie diets and longevity therapeutics given late in life may not be to prevent this damage, but instead to stimulate the body to eliminate damaged cells that may become cancerous, and to stimulate repair in damaged cells like neurons and heart cells. Low calorie diets drive the body to replace and repair damaged cells. This process usually slows down as we age, but low calorie diets make the body re-synthesise and turn over more cells – a situation associated with youth and good health. Dr. Spindler and his colleagues used their screening method to search for drugs which cause pre-cancerous and cancerous cells to commit suicide and to replace those cells with new, healthy cells. It is thought that the body does this because it normally kills some cells like damaged and rogue cancer cells to provide energy when it is starving. Then it replaces these cells when a meal is eaten."

It occurs to me that a drug that made you feel less hungry would do essentially the same thing, although this could have rather unpleasant side-effects.

It also seems that you should eat a very nutritious diet on top of the calorie-restriction.

Citizendium

Citizendium has been released in an experimental "beta" version. It will complement the original Wikipedia and the Digital Universe. Citizendium's language reflects the slightly more formal and less anarchic design of the encyclopedia as opposed to Wikipedia, with non-anonymous expert "constables" guiding and advising on the content of articles.

The aim of the project is impressive in scope, from Citizendium:

"As to quality, our goal is to capture humanity's multivarious understanding of reality, and thereby to paint a maximally broad and detailed portrait of our universe as accurately as we understand it. An indispensible means to this end is the involvement of many experts who will help guide and, ultimately, approve many of our articles. We expect our approved articles to be, in the long run, as authoritative, error-free, and well-written as encyclopedia articles can be expected to be."

This puts me in mind of the "library" in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which I am currently rereading. I think that this is a great step forward, and it will be reassuring to know that there is greater reliability in an online encyclopedia.

More Good News

One of the possible downsides of hydrogen fuel cells being used in cars is the expense of the platinum catalysts used in many cells. This story from Physorg.com (my main source of news on this sort of thing) seems to suggest that there are cheaper alternatives.

Micro-electro-mechanical-devices are one of those amazing ideas that makes your mind expand when you consider all the possible applications and ways they could change our lives. Progress is being made in this area as well.

One of the many exciting possibilities of molecular nanotechnology is the suggestion that molecules could be "put together" instead of formed through the normal methods of making useful chemicals. This research from the University of Illinois offers the first glimmerings of this capability using "mechanophores", or mechanically active molecules.

Pragmatism

With my growing interest in politics and economics I have been reading quite a lot about the various different ideologies and methods people have developed to perform the functions that the social sciences of economics and politics describe, namely:

1. The distribution and use of resources.
2. The way groups of people make decisions.

One of the irritating deficiencies of our current system is that all the people who become powerful in government do so for many reasons, but the common denominator out of all of these people is their desire to be powerful. This makes them singularly unsuited to exercise power.

If they (the politicians) are to function as we (the mass of people that makes up the electorate) want them to then they need to conceal, to a certain extent, their own desires and ambitions from us. Therefore they need to lie in order to be elected. I understand that James Buchanan wrote about this idea.

So in a sense it is our fault. We expect our elected representatives to have high moral standards, to the point of being Saints, and yet at the same time our system is such that you can only achieve high office through a certain amount of “politicking”. Playing the Game. Climbing the Greasy Pole.

There is also this terrible muddling of ideology and politics. Certainly people, and politicians, should have ideals. Politicians need to have a basic set of ideals that are common to all people. Things like Murdering is Bad, Stealing is Bad, and so forth.

We expect our politicians to be simultaneously pragmatic and idealistic. But it is not basic idealism, involving belief in something like human beings being essentially good (or essentially predictable), or morality, or the dream of a world where the largest number of people are as happy as possible (and the smallest number of people are as unhappy as possible), it is a complicated sort of idealism concerning things like economic policy (something best left up to experts), or environmentalism, or even religion.

Hypocrisy is now seen as being a cardinal sin. But wouldn’t things be better if politicians didn’t have to be hypocrites? Wouldn’t it be better if they stated exactly and precisely why they were doing everything i.e.

“It is correct that I am doing this so that people will re-elect me, and so I’ll be remembered as a good politician when I have retired, but I am mainly doing this because of the following detailed and carefully argued series of reasons, annotated to indicate the credible sources for all the statements I make. I concede there are some reasons why people might believe that this policy is not the best it can be, the reasons that I disagree with these people in my belief that this policy is the best it can be are also detailed in my series of reasons.”

I would clearly be a very poor politician, at least from the point of view of public speaking.

We also need a more scientific approach to government. Politicians need to be able to say: “Well we tried this policy and it hasn’t worked, so I’m going to try something else.” For some reason journalists deride this as “flip-flopping”. But it is just good sense. If City Academies don’t work then stop creating City Academies and close the ones that are open. If creating a system of targets doesn’t work find some other way of running the system (fortunately the government does seem to be doing something like this in education).

I hope that empirical methods are used a lot in government, and I concede that our state functions very well, with blunders and problems highlighted by the media to the extent that people get the impression that the state is constantly on the verge of collapse, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

One of the reasons politicians do what they do is that they will often have invested in a particular policy in order to get elected. They are then expected to enact that policy. In order to be elected politicians need to come up with interesting and revolutionary ideas even if, once they are in power, they realise the policies may no longer be entirely appropriate.

Ways of getting politicians to behave better include placing limits on the number of terms that an MP or Minister can serve, then they will be able to concentrate on their legacy (e.g. stopping global warming) as opposed to their re-election prospects (which might be damaged by taxing SUVs and Land Rovers). We should also stop treating them as if they should be saints and start treating them as professionals who have a job to do. Monitor, comment and criticise what they do. Monitor and comment on what they say but don’t judge them as if we expect them to be Great Leaders.

A democracy doesn't really benefit from invested large amounts of power in a single, charismatic individual. We need to concentrate on policies that demonstrably work without making Bad Things Happen.

Microscopic Alphabet Soup

This is a wonderfully whimsical way of demonstrating technology at work on the microscopic scale. From Physorg.com:

"We have made fluorescent lithographic particles, we have made complex three-dimensional shapes and, as shown by UCLA postdoctoral fellow Kun Zhao, we can assemble these particles, for example, in a lock-and-key relationship," said Mason, whose research is at the intersection of chemistry, physics, engineering and biology. "We can mass-produce complex parts having different controlled shapes at a scale much smaller than scientists have been able to produce previously. We have a high degree of control over the parts that we make and are on the verge of making functional devices in solution. We may later be able to configure the parts into more complex and useful assemblies."

Amazing stuff: and with such enormous potential.

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.