Tag Archives: ray kurzweil

We’re Pretty Much All Tripping, All the Time

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Watch Beau Lotto’s talk above on opti­cal illu­sions and how infor­ma­tion can dif­fer depend­ing on perception.

Writ­ten by Ben Thomas

The year was 1943, and the Pen­ta­gon had a prob­lem. They’d poured mil­lions of dol­lars into a new voice encryp­tion sys­tem — dubbed the “X Sys­tem” — but no one was cer­tain how secure it was. So the top brass called in Claude Shan­non to ana­lyze their code and — if all went well — to prove that it was math­e­mat­i­cally unbreakable.

Shan­non was a new breed of math­e­mati­cian: A spe­cial­ist in what’s known today as infor­ma­tion the­ory. To Shan­non and his fel­low the­o­rists, infor­ma­tion was some­thing sep­a­rate from the let­ters, num­bers and facts it rep­re­sented. Instead, it was some­thing more abstract; more math­e­mat­i­cal: in a word, it wasnon-redundancy.

As Beau Lotto explains in his pre­sen­ta­tion, we’re hal­lu­ci­nat­ing real­ity all the time — but we only take notice when our hal­lu­ci­na­tions fail to make accu­rate pre­dic­tions.– Ben Thomas

Take, for exam­ple, the sequence of let­ters spelling out “Let’s crack the codes.” It’s got a high level of redun­dancy — not all its let­ters are essen­tial for get­ting its mes­sage across. As long as you’ve got some prac­tice read­ing Eng­lish, you can look at a shorter, less-redundant sequence like “Lt’s crck th cdes” and fill in the miss­ing sounds. Along the same lines, Hebrew and Ara­bic speak­ers can read the vowel-free writ­ten forms of their lan­guages just fine. Our brains are sur­pris­ingly tal­ented at pick­ing up pat­terns, fill­ing in blanks, and ignor­ing redun­dant data — only when we’re uncer­tain about how to fill in a blank does infor­ma­tion become… well, informative.

Shannon’s non-redundancy idea isn’t just handy for crack­ing codes, though — today, it’s respon­si­ble for most of what you see on the Inter­net. JPEG image com­pres­sion, for instance, throws out most of an image’s data, and we rarely notice anything’s miss­ing — our brains’ visual sys­tem smooths out the rough spots. Same goes for MP3 com­pres­sion, and for the Flash video encod­ing used on YouTube. Ever since Shannon’s day, infor­ma­tion the­o­rists have been refin­ing their tech­niques, drilling closer and closer to the bare min­i­mum of infor­ma­tion required to con­vince us we’re not miss­ing any­thing. (You might say those ancient Hebrew and Ara­bic scribes were a few thou­sand years ahead of their time.)

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Data com­pres­sion isn’t just dig­i­tal, either — in fact, it’s hard­wired into our brains, from the neu­rons up. As Beau Lotto shows us in his TEDTalk above, every color we per­ceive is depen­dent on its con­text: What other col­ors sur­round it? Is it in light or in shadow? How’s the light tinted? And what’s true for light holds true for sound, too — as I explain in this arti­cle, your brain gets so pumped up about rhythm that it actu­ally hal­lu­ci­nates miss­ing beats. Oh, and if you’re in the mood for some­thing extra weird today, check out Oliver Sacks’ TEDTalk on Charles Bon­net syn­drome – a brain dis­or­der that makes peo­ple hal­lu­ci­nate vivid scenes from tiny stray nerve signals.

In light of all this, it’s hard to escape the inven­tor Ray Kurzweil’scon­clu­sion: “We don’t actu­ally see things [at all]; we hal­lu­ci­nate them in detail from low-resolution cues.” As Beau Lotto explains in his pre­sen­ta­tion, we’re hal­lu­ci­nat­ing real­ity all the time — but we only take notice when our hal­lu­ci­na­tions fail to make accu­rate pre­dic­tions; when we think we’re cer­tain of some­thing that’s actu­ally not so cer­tain, and our brains have to hunt down new infor­ma­tion in order to make bet­ter predictions.

Claude Shan­non once said, “Infor­ma­tion is the res­o­lu­tion of uncer­tainty.” The more cer­tain we are in our hal­lu­ci­na­tions, the less infor­ma­tion we think we need — and the less open to new infor­ma­tion we become. Beau Lotto fin­ishes his talk on a sim­i­lar note. “Only through uncer­tainty,” he says, “is there poten­tial for understanding.”

Luck­ily for the Allies in World War II, Shan­non had just the right kind of under­stand­ing for the job. After prov­ing the Pentagon’s X Sys­tem math­e­mat­i­cally uncrack­able, he helped lay the ground­work for the next gen­er­a­tion of mil­i­tary codes. His most endur­ing legacy, though, isn’t the codes he cre­ated, but the idea behind them: Only in uncer­tainty do we real­ize information’s value.

Humanity Plus Magazine Interviews Ancient Lasers

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Ancient Lasers @ BIL 2012

[Ancient Lasers is the musi­cal work of Daniel Fin­fer, a Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist and vocal­ist. Artists love to say their music has a mes­sage, but what hap­pens when that mes­sage is “the Sin­gu­lar­ity is Near”? Musi­cian Daniel Fin­fer cre­ates albums that explore the con­cepts and con­se­quences of accel­er­at­ing tech­nol­ogy while still pos­sess­ing enough pop-music chops to make them acces­si­ble. Ancient Lasers has tracks with titles like “You in the Future” and “Replac­ing You.” On first lis­ten they may sound like Finfer’s singing to a girl, but lines like “I don’t need you in the future” are about post-singularity robots dis­miss­ing the need for humans. Pretty trippy stuff, and awe­some to lis­ten to.] — Sin­gu­lar­ity Hub

By Rachel Haywire

Ques­tions

1. If you could get one aug­men­ta­tion what would it be?

While it would be nice to have tita­nium skin or lungs that would allow me to breathe under­wa­ter, the aug­men­ta­tion I would choose is one that should be the top pri­or­ity for sci­en­tists work­ing in this field. Intel­li­gence expan­sion. That’s really step one, isn’t it? If I could increase my intel­li­gence, and my capac­ity to under­stand intel­li­gence itself, invent­ing new aug­men­ta­tions on my wish­list would be much eas­ier. I know that is kind of a cop-out of an answer, so if intelligence-expansion wasn’t on the table, it would prob­a­bly be human flight. I have a ter­ri­ble fear of air­planes, which I’m fairly con­fi­dent stems from the fact that I was in a plane crash as a young child. Kind of ironic I teamed up with a band called Idiot Pilot to pro­duce Ancient Lasers, isn’t it?

Selec­tive hear­ing would come in handy these days, as well.

 

2. How would you feel about becom­ing a cyborg?

It depends on who is turn­ing me into a cyborg. One of my biggest wor­ries related to tech­nol­ogy is its abuse by world gov­ern­ments or cyber-terrorists. I have a hunch becom­ing cyborg would in some way involve the inter­net, and we have a long way to go before some­one will con­vince me to drink any cyber-Kool-Aid. I mean, I don’t want Wik­ileaks or Anony­mous hack­ing into my thoughts. My mind feels like the last place I can still hide in this world; where no one can get to me. Face­book and Twit­ter both started out as seem­ingly inno­cent, fun places to post your thoughts and dig­i­tal records of your daily organic life. But look at what’s hap­pen­ing now: the gov­ern­ment basi­cally turned social media sites into one giant population-monitoring sys­tem, and they love it.

If we are talk­ing phys­i­cally, sign me up. I would love to take a Mech­War­rior or a Gun­dam suit for a spin someday.

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Ancient Lasers Studios

3. Do you think there is going to be a war between humans and machines?

You could argue there already is one. Cer­tainly in the job mar­ket, at least. Machines have achieved a level of com­plex­ity that is actu­ally putting peo­ple out of work, and I’m afraid it’s only going to get “worse”. I use quotes because it all depends on your point of view. Sure, automa­tion cre­ates unem­ploy­ment, but that’s because we are cur­rently oper­at­ing in an obso­lete eco­nomic sys­tem that doesn’t know what to do with the unem­ployed. I think the def­i­n­i­tion of a “job” is going to change dra­mat­i­cally in the near future. We are tran­si­tion­ing towards a post-scarcity world (hope­fully), so maybe some­day our jobs as humans will be to sim­ply imag­ine and cre­ate. The enter­tain­ment indus­try is cur­rently one of the largest grow­ing sec­tors, after all.

Get­ting back to your ques­tion, how­ever, I do think there would be a cat­a­clysmic event involv­ing a post-human Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence if it was built care­lessly. As a human, I have empa­thy for my infant self, and look back on those years fondly. But how do I feel about myself when I was an embryo? I don’t have any empa­thy – because I was so dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent back then I might as well have been some­one else entirely. That is how I believe a post-human Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence would regard human­ity – some kind of pest get­ting in the way of its quest to max­i­mize com­plex­ity and reverse its own entropy. If it came down to that – a war between humans and a greater intel­li­gence, I wouldn’t even try to fight it. I would throw my gun at its feet, know­ing that my role as a human was to build a post-human. I could find com­fort dying at the hands of a machine – it would feel like some cos­mic passing-of-the-torch. Obvi­ously, I would pre­fer not to.

Another pos­si­bil­ity is a war between humans at var­i­ous stages of tech­no­log­i­cal pro­gres­sion, much like the war between Homo-Sapiens and the Nean­derthal. His­tory is one long race to some dis­tant, intan­gi­ble fin­ish line – hope­fully who­ever gets there first still has some com­pas­sion for humanity.

4. What is the best way to make peo­ple more aware of Transhumanism?

This is a very tough ques­tion – in fact one I try to answer every day as an artist focused on edu­cat­ing peo­ple about Tran­shu­man­ism. Clearly many artists and vision­ar­ies have tried. John Lennon’s “Imag­ine” is a per­fect exam­ple. But as they say, a fish ahead of its time is doomed to die on dry land. You would think by now we’d have fig­ured it out, but the peo­ple in charge don’t want us to “fig­ure it out”. Lady Gaga, for exam­ple, has a very tran­shu­man mes­sage that I think res­onates with a lot of peo­ple. But most peo­ple don’t real­ize that she actu­ally stud­ied fame, and pretty much had the con­cept for her career planned out. And at the end of the day, there’s still some­one at the record label look­ing at the bot­tom line. There is only so much she can do within that busi­ness model. Most enter­tain­ment is focused on mak­ing us for­get how utterly aston­ish­ing it is to be human; to be alive at this moment in his­tory. This is the bot­tom of the funnel.

Cor­po­ra­tions are excel­lent at mak­ing us feel like we’re impor­tant, when in real­ity they regard us as a dol­lar sign or a num­ber on the com­puter screen. And for a while, it worked. It felt good to go to McDonald’s, or Star­bucks, or Best Buy. It felt good to be ‘part of the club’. Peo­ple have an evo­lu­tion­ary need to belong somewhere…to be part of a com­mu­nity. We have always been that way, it is in who we are. Even before cor­po­ra­tions, you had Nation­al­ism and Reli­gion – two major sys­tems that are also start­ing to fall apart. When I was a kid, it seemed like it made sense, and, hey, it was fun. Fire­works on the Fourth of July? Christ­mas presents? Sign me up! The peo­ple at the top of these insti­tu­tions are experts in marketing.

But to the main­stream, Tran­shu­man­ism is ter­ri­fy­ing. I mean, even to me, it’s ter­ri­fy­ing, and I’ve been research­ing it for seven years now. Clearly the answer isn’t at the bot­tom of a Coke Zero or in the pages of an ancient book. I think one thing that a lot of us involved in this new move­ment have in com­mon is that we aren’t sat­is­fied with the answers we’ve been taught in school. We have to spread this mes­sage, because it is all we can think about. The mes­sage is spread­ing, thank­fully, and hope­fully we can turn oth­ers on to it. Right now feels like the Six­ties on Steroids. And it’s hap­pen­ing because every­one on earth is get­ting the real infor­ma­tion, as they come online.

The bot­tom line is that we need more money fun­neled into sci­ence. Plain and sim­ple. We need to get it out of archaic sys­tems and insti­tu­tions, but we need to show and tell peo­ple why. That’s what I do with my music, or at least try to.

5. What would your ideal future look like?

My ideal future would be some sort of ‘con­sen­sus real­ity’, that is, a real­ity where every­one can find the place where they belong and feel happy. There is a the­ory about what will come after sci­ence called Thalience, a term coined by Karl Schroeder. Assum­ing that in a post-human world every­thing will become intel­li­gent, even­tu­ally the entire uni­verse will expand to become itself. We would all be one. The uni­verse we would become could play games with time and space, relive past mem­o­ries, talk to lost loved ones…Anything. But maybe we would get bored after a while and make some sort of ‘sur­prise but­ton’ – where one day we decide “Okay, we’re bored, so let’s invent a way to keep it enter­tain­ing.” Maybe this entire uni­verse is the result of a post-human get­ting bored and press­ing that but­ton. I don’t know. They’re only theories.

In the end, I think an ideal future is one where we can look back on all of this and feel like it mattered.

6. If you could change one thing about human­ity what would you change?

Every­one has to crabwalk.

We Will Either Live Forever or Be Killed By Robots In…“The Singularity”

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We are liv­ing dur­ing a very impor­tant time. It is a time in which time itself seems to be speed­ing up. It is also a time in which the prospect of being able to pre­vent our own death is becom­ing fea­si­ble. Intrigued? You should be — some­thing called The Sin­gu­lar­ity may ren­der you immortal.

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The Map Of The Internet


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Early Multi-Cellular Life

At the dawn of life on this planet, evo­lu­tion­ary changes hap­pened slow. Bil­lions of years slow. One microbe took bil­lions of years to evolve the DNA nec­es­sary to repli­cate itself from sim­ple amino acids. But that first copy­ing mech­a­nism, DNA, allowed infor­ma­tion to be trans­mit­ted that much faster. Then, evo­lu­tion only took mil­lions of years to cre­ate multi-cellular crea­tures. Good infor­ma­tion was kept, and bad infor­ma­tion was dis­carded. The wheel of time con­tin­ued until evo­lu­tion pre­sented the planet Earth with a new species — human beings. Except this species was dif­fer­ent — this was the first intel­li­gence on the planet.

This is where the evo­lu­tion­ary process of life really began to accel­er­ate. Instead of mil­lions of years to the next par­a­digm shift, it was only 50,000 years until Man began to talk. And then, only 10,000 to develop agri­cul­ture, writ­ten lan­guage, soci­ety, and gov­ern­ment. Another 5,000 elapsed, and we had con­structed Pyra­mids, devel­oped the­o­log­i­cal and mon­e­tary sys­tems, and had begun col­o­niz­ing the planet. This led to the devel­op­ment of Sci­ence a few thou­sand years later. Sci­ence, after a few mere cen­turies, gave rise to the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, which after only 50 years gave us the Com­puter Rev­o­lu­tion. Notice the trend? Evo­lu­tion is a feed­back loop.

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“Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the his­tory of com­put­ing hard­ware, in which the num­ber of tran­sis­tors that can be placed inex­pen­sively on an inte­grated cir­cuit has dou­bled approx­i­mately every two years.”

When Moore made this pre­dic­tion at Cal­Tech in the 1970’s, com­put­ers were the size of build­ings. Now one fits in your pocket, and a par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor in CERN is capa­ble of achiev­ing the cold­est tem­per­a­ture in the uni­verse and a mag­netic field thou­sands of times more pow­er­ful than the Earth’s– all to find the God Par­ti­cle that allowed the uni­verse to be cre­ated. Forty years ago a machine that sized could barely run Pong.

This is only the begin­ning, how­ever — imag­ine the things we will achieve with com­put­ers the size of red-blood cells float­ing inside the body. Nanobots will soon be inte­grat­ing them­selves into our bio­log­i­cal struc­ture, repair­ing bro­ken synapses in the brain, clean­ing out arter­ies and cre­at­ing a virtual-reality inter­face within your visual cor­tex. Don’t believe me? Ask Ray Kurzweil, who this year co-founded the Sin­gu­lar­ity Uni­ver­sity in Palo Alto with Google and NASA. Their sole mis­sion is to cre­ate a human-computer hybrid that will allow us to live forever.

Why a hybrid? Why not sim­ply cre­ate a smarter-than-human com­puter and have it solve all our prob­lems? Because that com­puter might decide that keep­ing us humans on Planet Earth would hin­der its own progress in evo­lu­tion — that we pose a threat to its sur­vival. Or, the com­puter might even con­vert the entire solar sys­tem into a big­ger ver­sion of itself to solve the prob­lem. In Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Ques­tion”, sci­en­tists keep build­ing big­ger and big­ger com­put­ers; while con­stantly ask­ing the mean­ing of life. It is not until the very end, when, after the entire uni­verse has been con­verted into a com­puter that the final answer is given.

The UN even recently passed a law ban­ning “self-replicating nanobots” to pre­vent the planet from being cov­ered in a “gray goo” of robotic microbes. This only sup­ports how real this is all becom­ing. Six years ago, Face­book was being invented. Now, 500 mil­lion peo­ple have moved parts of their lives “online”, and could not imag­ine life with­out it. Ten years ago, cell phones and lap­tops were only just becom­ing com­mon­place within the soci­etal lex­i­con. Now, hav­ing a desk­top or even lap­top com­puter is viewed as being a nui­sance and has­sle. In the next ten years, how­ever, the change will be faster. We know this because it’s been speed­ing up this entire time.

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Every day, more things hap­pen than the day before– because today we have bet­ter tools for com­mu­ni­cat­ing, work­ing, liv­ing, and repli­cat­ing infor­ma­tion than we did yes­ter­day. The move from ana­log to dig­i­tal will be almost too grad­ual to notice, but one thing is cer­tain: Human­ity is upload­ing itself onto the inter­net, which now appears to have turned Planet Earth into a col­lec­tive brain; every human being a neu­ron in the sys­tem. This col­lec­tive brain will soon aban­don the mor­tal prob­lems we face today, but it will face prob­lems on a uni­ver­sal scale. Like how to pre­vent its col­laps­ing, par­ent star from dying, how to exist in mul­ti­ple dimen­sions, or even how to bet­ter allo­cate intel­li­gence through­out the universe.

Maybe then it will even send out tiny seeds to land on dis­tant planets…just like the amino acids that landed on Earth.

BIL Conference 2012 — In Retrospect

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I recently wrote about my expe­ri­ence at BIL 2011 in this arti­cle, but I absolutely have to update and tell you about BIL Con­fer­ence 2012 — mainly because of how much it exceeded my expectations.

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Simone and Alexis Not Pictured!

First off, there were more peo­ple in atten­dance.  I believe we clocked in at over 800(!) peo­ple.  It seems our mes­sage is truly begin­ning to spread and pick up speed, which is no sur­prise — alot has hap­pened since March of 2011.

We are finally see­ing the rise of the “Inter­net voice”, as made evi­dent by the huge amount of activism by Twit­ter, Anony­mous, Occupy Wall Street, and many more connectivity-based move­ments.  Peo­ple are start­ing to step away from the com­puter (with iPhone or Droid still firmly in hand) and take to the streets.  Infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies are mak­ing peo­ple real­ize how much work there is to do to fix the prob­lems our soci­ety still faces.  Yet, many peo­ple that want and can do some­thing to help don’t know where to turn.  I didn’t.  Before con­nect­ing with the peo­ple at BIL, I had moti­va­tion and knew what I wanted to do, but didn’t know there were thou­sands of other peo­ple that had the same ideas.

BIL, by nature, is a very geeky event.  As a counter-culture shadow con­fer­ence that not-so-coincidentally occurs right around TED, you would expect this.  And by nature, these peo­ple don’t have alot of free time for social inter­ac­tion — and most find the usual “club and bar scene” to be trite and super­fi­cial (myself included).  The beauty in BIL is that it gives the nerdy, quirky, sub­ver­sive, think–way-the-fuck-outside-the-box types a sin­gu­lar event to come and talk about all the insanely cool projects they’ve been work­ing on in the past year.

New addi­tions this year included:

  • Space Stage, where SpaceX and XCOR showed off some very cool, pri­vately funded space vehi­cles. A
  • Burning-Man-esque.…dodecahedron? (It’s a geo­met­ric shape I can’t describe in human lan­guage).  Peo­ple were relax­ing and singing karaoke when they needed a mind-rest from talks.
  • Massage/Cupping sta­tion.
  • Speed Dat­ing and Rela­tion­ship Dis­cus­sions in the Red Room.
  • Col­lege Of Lockpicking
  • Crash­space 3D Print­ing Demonstration
  • Hal­cyon Mol­e­c­u­lar DNA microscope
  • BIL2012 Anthem!
  • Per­for­mances by Max Luga­vere and Ancient Lasers

At the clos­ing cer­e­mony, Reichart auc­tioned off a chance to sit in on a live read­ing of Futu­rama, with the full cast (as well as him­self and Simone for dates).  Their com­bined sex­i­ness helped put a deposit for BIL2013! Maria Entraigues and myself also per­formed the first ever “BIL Anthem” — and we got Aubrey de Grey to jump on stage and bust out a smooth 16 bar rap verse about “biol­ogy, nan­otech­nol­ogy, quan­tum com­put­ing, more biol­ogy…”  That was def­i­nitely a fit­ting way to end the con­fer­ence.  Spe­cial thanks to Reichart, Maria, Aubrey and Simone for mak­ing that hap­pen with 4 days notice!

In con­clu­sion, BIL expanded my mind and now I have a thirst for knowl­edge — and meet­ing the peo­ple who pos­sess it. I know I’m leav­ing out tons of amaz­ing peo­ple I met, and I apol­o­gize in advance.  More posts com­ing!  I have a big list of sim­i­lar con­fer­ences, con­certs, and events like BIL in my Google Docs, and I hope to check a few dozen off the list by the time 2012 is over.

BIL Conference: A Casual Convention of People Who Want To Change The World

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Whether you have seen the fas­ci­nat­ing and often mind expand­ing videos posted online, or have been lucky enough to go in per­son, you prob­a­bly know about TED.  If you are like me (incred­i­bly inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy but not really will­ing to spend thou­sands of dol­lars to go to a con­fer­ence), check out TED’s cooler-yet-nerdier lit­tle brother BIL on the Queen Mary March 2-4th in Long Beach, CA.

BILder’s (as we like to call them) come from all around the world to share ideas, give talks, per­form live music, teach classes, net­work, brain­storm ways to fix the world…whatever! That’s the beauty of BIL, what it is and what it will become is com­pletely up to the BILders them­selves — theres no con­crete agenda.  It is what you make it.

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It’s kind of like this

Last year was my first BIL expe­ri­ence, and I can hon­estly say it set the tone for the rest of my year in the most pos­i­tive way pos­si­ble.  I met BIL co-founders Simone Syed and Reichart Von Wolf­sheild when I hosted the after-party for the Los Ange­les pre­miere of Tran­scen­dent Man — Ray Kurzweil’s fea­ture doc­u­men­tary about the Tech­no­log­i­cal Sin­gu­lar­ity. I was demo­ing Ancient Lasers tracks for the sin­gu­lar­ity folks that night and they asked me if I wanted to play at BIL.

Once there I met some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple I have ever been graced to know.  I spend alot of time around peo­ple that don’t really share the same inter­ests as me in my daily life, so it was so refresh­ing to hear phrases like “machine learn­ing”, “brain hack­ing”, and “nanobot foglets” being thrown around in casual con­ver­sa­tion. I got to meet Burn­ing Man guru John Hal­cyon, Life exten­sion author Aubrey De Grey, lifestyle blog­ger extra­or­di­naire Judd Weiss, the folks from the Sin­gu­lar­ity Uni­ver­sity…The list goes on.

BIL Conference: A Casual Convention of People Who Want To Change The World

Aubrey de Grey Speak­ing at BIL 2011

After BIL, we all kept in touch and I per­son­ally know more than a cou­ple new star­tups and other projects that were born from the con­fer­ence and the con­nec­tions it facil­i­tated.  Its incred­i­ble to think about how much has hap­pened since last year and how many new friends I made.

This year Ancient Lasers is per­form­ing with spe­cial guest Max Luga­vere from Cur­rent TV Sat­ur­day, March 3rd at 8pm.  Jimmy Delshad, the mayor of Bev­erly Hills, life exten­sion­ist author Aubrey de Grey, CEO of Vir­gin Galac­tic George White­sides, XCOR co-founder Doug Jones, and many many more.

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BIL 2012

I highly rec­om­mend com­ing to check it out, I promise you wont leave empty-headed.