The Hawker Squawker

I have often half-jokingly talked about “when the singularity arrives and i upload my mind into a new body…”.  Of course, this is nirvana for many of the Singularitarian‘s.  A way to cheat death and live forever.

Time for some thought experiments.  Do i really think this is possible?  If it is (or becomes so in the future), would it be a good thing?  Would i personally want to do it?  The biggest question: Would it really still be you?  It seems like even if your mind was perfectly replicated it would only be a copy.  I suppose as things go, if you did a weekly backup and died, at most, the “real” you who had died couldn’t complain.  Because you’re dead.  And the “copy” you would feel as if they were you (minus the memories of whatever had happened in the intervening week since the backup).

I can certainly see the allure of something like this.  But then if you take some religious and philosophical viewpoints, things get a little fuzzy.  “You can’t copy the soul” someone might say.  So all you have is a soulless robot that thinks, remembers, acts, and might (or might not) look like you.  But isn’t really you. What is the soul?  Is it the sum of all your memories and likes/dislikes?  What if all that is copied exactly?  Is it something more elusive that can’t be copied?  “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter“.

What about this.  I back up my brain.  I then go and kill someone, and then kill myself.  My previous backup kicks in and downloads to a new body.  Is that new “me” responsible for the murder?  “I” didn’t do it.  The “other” me did, right?  What if you run two backups at the same time?  Which one is “you”?  Who has to pay the taxes?  Which ones goes to work?  Which one gets to be with your wife and children?

Of course, a thought that occurs to me is the tower of babel.  This seems like a modern equivalent – man trying to reach out and touch heaven through artificial means.  “let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven … and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Gen 11: 4, 6).  What do you think?

I meant to post this a while back, but got distracted and forgot about it.

Mid April I went to Vegas for a day to attend a conference for work.  While there, I had the good fortune to be there at the same time that Ray Kurzweil was giving a keynote address!  I gotta say – he’s a very interesting man.  He would just nonchalantly say stuff like “oh ya, i’m working with top pentagon officials on ways to prevent nanobot warfare”.

There were a couple of points he made that i found quite interesting.  While talking on “the educational system crisis”, he basically said that the current method of education by rote memorization of facts is outdated and should be replaced.  “We don’t need to teach facts.  We can carry the sum total of human knowledge on our belts.  We need to participate in exciting projects that make use of that knowledge“.  In other words, don’t just learn about something.  But go out and build something.  Do a class project that demonstrates the knowledge in action.  Seeing something actually physically happen as a result of an abstract idea – that’s where it’s at.  I can completely relate to this.  That’s why i was so fascinated by computers at a young age.  I could type in lines of code on a screen, and then run my program and cause the computer to do something.  I wasn’t just learning about for loops and discreet mathematics for the sake of academia.  I could actually apply it in the real world to make things happen.

After he got done talking about life extension and that how people younger than their mid to late 40′s will see the average human lifespan increase by more than one year per year (effectively letting everyone live forever, barring accidents), the inevitable questions of “what about overpopulation, resource constraints, and being old and decrepit” were asked.  His response was “the same technologies which will extend life will also extend resources.  And we won’t just have life extension, but life expansion“.  In other words, we’ll be able to solve the new problems that come with living longer and longer.

It was really cool to hear him talk.  If i hadn’t been with a group of co-workers, i’d have probably gone up and had him sign a book for me.  Ah well.  Another time, perhaps.  After all, we’ll both be alive for a very long while, right?

“Yesterday’s posthumanism is today’s boring quotidian [everyday/commonplace].”

In reading an interesting blog post about posthumanism, the author makes several good points. First off, people seem to think of being post human as something where whoever survives the apocalypse will be turned into machine zombies or something. If you stop to think about it, “post human” is something that you can really apply to us today, if viewed from the eyes of people even a century or two ago. I mean, we’ve got these little devices that fit in our pockets that connect us to the sum total of the worlds information at the click of a button. We can travel from one end of the earth to the other in hours. And we can communicate with anyone anywhere instantly (unless you’re on AT&T, then you might drop the call, but hey…) If you’re hard of hearing or have bad eyesight? No problem. Just get a hearing aid or some glasses. If your heart is bad – we can replace that. Lose a leg? Get a new one. Can’t have a baby? Grow one “in vitro”.

Do these things mean we’re no longer human? Should you go without glasses and see the world in a ball of fuzz just so you’re more “pure” somehow? Of course not. And as time moves forward, more and more things will change, and we’ll change along with them, and we’ll still be human. Or, as Jamais Cascio puts it in his article:

We will never be posthuman, because we have always been posthuman.

“Posthuman” is a term with more weight than meaning; it’s used variously to describe people with altered genomes, people with implanted machinery, people with lifespans measured in millennia, and a whole host of descriptors that ultimately boil down to “not us, not now.”

…

But as augmentations move from the pages of a science fiction story to the pages of a catalog, something interesting happens: they lose their power to disturb. They’re no longer the advance forces of the techpocalypse, they’re the latest manifestation of the fashionable, the ubiquitous, and the banal. They’re normal. They’re human.

…

technologies that we now celebrate or decry as leading to our posthuman future … the technologies of human augmentation will lead to the collapse of society … [but] the spread of the Internet and easy communication will mean that most of us will have heard about these technologies as they develop. By the time they arrive, they’ll already be boring.

…

Posthumanity, from this perspective, will always be just over the horizon. Always in The Future. When the systems and augmentations we now consider to be posthuman hit the real world, they will have become simply human in scale.

That’s because augmentation – the development of systems and technologies to allow us to do and to be more than what our natural biology would allow – is intrinsic to what it means to be human. Thrown weapons expanded the range of our strength; control of fire allowed us to see in the dark; written words expanded the duration of our memories. If these all sound utterly primitive and unworthy of comment, try to imagine what it would have been like to be without them – and to find yourself competing against others equipped with them. The last hundred thousand years has been the slow history of the process of augmentation.

…

For the people living in a future surrounded by altered genomes, implanted machinery, and vastly extended lifespans, it will all be boringly normal. Unworthy of comment. And very, very human.

Everybody’s favorite futurist, Ray Kurzweil has come up with a list of big changes we can expect to see in the coming decade.  If he’s even half-right (and he probably is, based on past performance), it’s shaping up to be some really exciting times.

Just to name a few:

Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand.

Full Article here

Here’s an interesting take on uploading our consciousness into something else – another body, a computer, etc.. and why it wouldn’t be us. It might work, but it would always be a copy. We (the original) would still be there.

Human consciousness is irrevocably integrated in our organic components. People have always thought of themselves according to the leading technological systems of the day, and with us that’s computers – but the mind isn’t a program that can be copied out onto upgraded hardware. It’s an emergent effect of a hundred billion neurons, uncountable connections, a bath of chemicals and all sorts of input from our body. Besides, the very word “copy” shows that even if you could do it, you wouldn’t benefit – since the copy can exist at the same time, it has to be someone else.

–Luke McKinney @ The Daily Galaxy

To which i’d have to say – that’s a good point. But if the original you is terminally ill, has age-related dementia, or gets hit by a car one day, wouldn’t it be nice to have a backup somewhere that you could boot up in a new body and carry on?

The other day i was having a discussion about technology at work (it tends to happen when you work with a bunch of computer programmers). After a bit the conversation turned to how the world and the people in it are becomming more and more connected. Which lead naturally (or so it seemed at the time) to how it must be getting more and more difficult as the years go by to keep students from “cheating” when they enter the dreaded … testing center. “Back in my day”, the worst thing they had to worry about was someone sneaking in a calculator on their math test. Not so any more. With ever more smart and small phones with the internet at your fingertips it’s got to be even worse. And just wait until implants and neural interfaces come along. What then will you do oh testing gods? Force everyone into a

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

>faraday cage?

Well of course the real answer is that the nature of testing needs to change. I mean, seriously. Out in “the real world”, when i have a question that needs answering, i have all sorts of resources at my fingertips. Books, computers, the internet, co-workers. That’s just how the world is. And to make testing so different than the real world kind of invalidates the point of the test, if you ask me. What needs to happen is that testing methods need to change. I had a few classes where you were allowed to take your notes and your books and your calculators (remember, almost nobody had a laptop, and cell-phones were monstrous bricks that actually only did phone calls). In those tests, you either knew how to apply the principles to solve the problem or you didn’t. That’s the right direction. Go to class, learn the basics about how to approach solving whatever problem domain you’re studying, and then when you test, use all the resources you can. (phone a friend anyone?)

I wonder if my good friend over at Academic Evolution would agree?

I’ve just discovered the joys of Qik – live streaming video from my phone!

http://www.qik.com/yarell3

You can also subscribe to an RSS feed (which allows you to download the videos locally if you like): http://qik.com/yarell3/latest-videos

I can add a title, set location information (if i want), mark the video private/public, and then it will send notifications (if i want) to twitter, facebook, and youtube whenever i stream live video. How cool is that?

My Android G1 with its 3.1megapixel camera actually does pretty good (especially in sunlight). This will be great for capturing impromptu moments to share with friends and family.

(It might also come in handy if i’m ever in the middle east during a revolution!)

I just recently listened to an interview with John Smart (which you can find on the http://accelerating.org website if you’re interested in seeing more). He talked about six things coming in the near future as we progress towards the singularity, including the humbot, the metaverse, and the cybertwin. All of which are very interesting.

But one thing that really struck me was when we mentioned a term he called the flying car future. By this he means that oftentimes when predicting the future, people are way off. It’s not that in the future the predicted technologies aren’t possible, but that they’re not really practical or useful. Think of jet packs or flying cars or just about anything else people in the 1930′s – 1950′s were predicting about the future. Many of those things can be done today, but very few of them are. There are simply better alternatives. His point is that even today, many people are making wild predictions that probably could happen in a few decades. But in a few decades … who will care? The technology of the future will be far better than anything we predict.

Here’s an awesome idea made reality. The cloud mirror.

Basic premise: Have someone stand in front of a mirror. Using some really cool (and relatively simple) tech under the covers, display a speech bubble on the mirror next to their face that displays a bunch of personal information about the person.

The camera does face recognition to find out who the person is. It then looks up information about them from facebook and twitter api’s, as well as extra data entered “by their friends” via sms messages. This information is then displaed in real time whenever someone walks up to the mirror.

Check out the video, read the article, and see what you think.

IBM is getting a computer ready to take on Jeopardy! They are hoping to get Ken Jennings to compete. Makes sense. He’s the ultimate Jeopardy champion. Who better to represent mankind?

Go Ken! Save from us from the rise of the machines (at least for a few more years…) Link Here

And on a cool note, there are now (or will soon be) glasses and contact lenses that support augmented reality views. Consider that one top of my christmas list for whenever they come out.

The glasses are called heads-up displays because the wearer can always look through them and see the real world

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