The Safeticons and the Struggle to Bring Back Risk

Over at Wired (article here), more than a few people are calling Ray Kurzweil a kook for his attempt to increase his lifespan in order to survive in time for the so-called "singularity," the imagined point at which machines will become self-improving and increasingly more intelligent. In fact, Kurzweil believes that machines will become so intelligent that humans will be left in the dust (Listen to Kurzweil at this Long Now seminar here and for a more skeptical take from Bruce Sterling listen here. I would also recommend the Singularity Summit which is available to download from iTunes). A number of great Sci-fi books tackle the Singularity concept. I would recommend Vernor Vinge and Charles Stross.

There are many intriguing items in the articles and many debatable points in the comments. Which side do I come on? I'm not sure that we will see singularity or the rise of AI, but I do anticipate that we are the verge of extreme life extension through a constellation of cuurently infant technologies. These include nanotechnology and biotechnology. Our ability to manipulate the body at its most fundamental levels will increase. We will be able to alter our genetics and possible arrest cell death. Is this a good thing? I don't know, but we should be anticipating this and preparing for the consequences.

I will tackle the concept of whether we are near a singularity in future posts. Right now, I want to focus on another issue, jumping off from this comment in the Wired article:

Though both Grossman and Kurzweil respect science, their approach is necessarily improvisational. If a therapy has some scientific promise and little risk, they'll try it. Kurzweil gets phosphatidylcholine intravenously, on the theory that this will rejuvenate all his body's tissues. He takes DHEA and testosterone. Both men use special filters to produce alkaline water, which they drink between meals in the hope that negatively charged ions in the water will scavenge free radicals and produce a variety of health benefits. This kind of thing may seem like quackery, especially when promoted by various New Age outfits touting the "pH miracle of living." Kurzweil and Grossman justify it not so much with scientific citations — though they have a few — but with a tinkerer's shrug. "Life is not a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study," Grossman explains. "We don't have that luxury. We are operating with incomplete information. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves."

Some of the commenters for the article have ridiculed Kurzweil for his experimentation and his proselytizing of the Singularity concept. Many view him as a con artist. I have not purchased any of his books and do not subscribe to his methods, but I appreciate his efforts at "tinkering."
If he wants to his body as an experiment, I do not have a problem with it. In fact, I encourage it.

Kurzweil's tinkering reminds me of the Newton experiment in which he poked a stick in his eye to determine the mechanism through which it sees light. This experiment and many other strange and odd experiments by early scientists are wonderfully described in Quicksilver, the first book in Neal Stephenson's trilogy The Baroque Cycle. The genius of the book is the way in which it evokes the early culture of science, which involves a lot of quackery, sketchy ethics, and personal risk.

The key among these traits highlighted in Quicksilver for me is personal risk in the service of knowledge and progress. I think that this is an ill in American society today. There are too many protections against allowing people to put themselves at risk, whether as a astronaut or a cancer patient volunteering for a new treatment. While the Columbia disaster was a terrible tragedy, it only further slowed manned missions to space and reinforced the current culture of over-caution at NASA. I don't know for sure, but I imagine this has helped to delay the efforts to send astronauts back to Moon and on to Mars (though they are many factors). I think this attitude has contributed to our fear of utilizing nuclear power despite its positives, especially in freeing us from greenhouse gas emitting power sources.

There are many instances in which our society has become too cautious. Over the long term, I think this could help cost America its position in the world as a science and technology giant (China seems more willing to take risks, though often in immoral ways) or could cost humanity its long-term survival.

The good news is that we are that there is a new sense of urgency regarding progress and a new willingness to take risks. Tellingly, I think this being primarily led by the private sector. The private sector is leading the charge toward easier access to space (news here). This may be our greatest hope for the future: corporations, maverick businesses, and kooky scientists. So, while many may dismiss Ray Kurweil, I take comfort in knowing that someone out there is willing to use their body as a lab. One day, it may help prolong my life.

The End of the Beginning?

I consider myself to generally be an optimist, but there are times where optimism can't be blind to the facts. I fear that the Bear-Stearns collapse may only be the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.

One commonly-mentioned facet of the US economy is that it is driven primarily by consumer-spending. One commonly-mentioned aspect of modern consumers is that they are drowning in debt. Now, it appears that era of ignoring the debt and confidently continuing spending is over. As a result, the economy could be in for a seriously long-term struggle.

When you read a statistics like the one below, you begin to understand the predicament we are in:

Over the last seven years, every new job that has been created has resulted in
$1.8 million of new public- and private-sector debt. That's obviously not
sustainable. That's way too inefficient. It used to be about 50 cents of new
debt was required to generate $1 in gross-domestic-product growth. Now it's
$9 for $1 of GDP growth.

This is from an interview in Wired with investor Eric Janszen, who recently wrote in Harper's about the decline of the financial, real estate, and insurance markets as the bedrock of the American economy. Janszen offers a plan: invest in clean energy (even nuclear). I would agree, if I were an investor. I would also bet on biotechnology and nanotechnology.

But, at the Singularity Summit last fall, PayPal founder Peter Thiel presented an interesting theory about the volatile boom & bust cycles of the past thirty years. He explains (his presentation is available on iTunes) that the due to our technological innovations markets we should expect that the markets would be less volatile and more predictable. Instead, we have had the exact opposite.

He said that this is a reasonable outcome of the markets trying to anticipate the ultimate singularity, when ever-increasing value will be possible and investors will not want to miss on that. Thiel states that one of these booms will eventually pan out as the singularity or it will signal the end of the world. He suggests that we should anticipate many more cycles of boom & bust leading up to the singularity and the next cycle will not be easy to predict.

Technology is changing the rules and the technological change continues. Nobody knows anything.

Technologies accelerate, Humans not so much

One of the foundations of the Singularity is the concept that technology is self-accelerating and that at some point it will become self-improving. I have not seen the self-improving part so much, but over the last few years I have seen the self-accelerating part.

When I started in my current field, GIS (Geographic Information Systems), in 2002-2004, digital geography was still in its nascent form and it was being utilized in a powerful, but not world-historical transformative scale. Its strange, I come into it at a time that was still relatively innocent, when you could put together a digital map and feel relatively impressed with yourself. That early experience has given me just the right amount of perspective for what has followed. I think this podcast (scroll down to the 2004 area and look for David Rumsey) by David Rumsey captures the pre-2005 mood perfectly. GIS was an exciting field and there had been many efforts by many devoted people to spread the information to the general public.

Then, Google Earth arrived and everything changed. Virtually overnight everybody's connection to geography changed and the expectations went through the roof. You can still impress people with a nice, clean digital map, but it is an order of magnitude more difficult to find such a person.

However, the scary thing is that the changes are just beginning and the advance of GIS technology is far out-stripping the ability of most people to capitalize on it (this applies to me and the people I work for and with). The revolution is only starting. There is a convergence of technologies occurring that will totally transform our relation to our world within the next decade. Many people have a limited exposure to these technologies through Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth, but these only offer a small peek of what's to come.

Today, I listened to an intriguing Long Now podcast by Paul Saffo, a forecaster associated with Stanford University. In the podcast, Saffo mentions that the 80's were the decade of cheap processing power (the advent of the personal computer), the 90's were the decade of the cheap laser (the advent of fiber optics and the networked world), and this decade will be the decade of the cheap sensor. He right on because I've seen it in action in GIS, real-world (not quite real-time) sensing has gotten much more affordable. That's why Google and Microsoft have been able to invest in it on a Nationwide scale that the government could not even have imagined.

Combined with computer processing power and networking power, the ability to create models from this newly available sensing data has grown exponentially. It will not be long before we will be able to view a functional mirror world model of the real world that is a near perfect representation of the real world.

There are five key technologies involved in this transformation, these include LiDAR (laser-based sensing of the Earth's surface), hand held GPS, street-view GPSed photography (now viewable on Google Maps), cheap digital color orthophotography (straight down view), and oblique photography (the "bird's eye view" now available on Virtual Earth). While all these technologies have a certain "wow" factor on their own, the meat of them is the advancing, but still infantile, ability to pull these technologies together and create models. One demonstration of a model I recently saw was breath-taking.

As impressive as these technologies are, the amazing part to me is the utter lack of applicability these things have to most people in comparison to the richness present in the data. The data is extremely valuable, especially in comparison to price, and there is money to be made by the people who really figure out how to make it applicable to the average person.