Perhaps I should say “Can you tell how we made this image?”, because there is more going on here than just my mind and hand. Sure, as far back as a decade ago it might’ve been possible for someone to make the same edits, but that person would need to be far more experienced than I.

To view the original, click below and hover over the image above.
Turn hover mode on.

When comparing the images side-by-side, it’s easy to tell that the part of the picture that was filled in is lower detail and has a few errors, but unless you’ve worked with a lot of images in the past I’m guessing that it wasn’t apparent before seeing the original. My partner in crime here was a tool called Resynthesizer for the GIMP. This is the open-source version of the “content aware fill” that will be included in the next version of Photoshop.

The reason that I’m able to perform such a complex fill on an image is not because I am experienced. It is because the tools have knowledge and skill embedded into them by their creators. As AI becomes more successful, our tools will become more competent at doing complex things with little supervision. This will put people out of work. This is the future. We don’t need or want more capable people, we want more capable autonomous systems; systems that can mow lawns, shovel snow, cook, clean, write, watch, build, experiment, and teach.

Vanguard has some of my favorite reporting on global events and trends. This week they investigate robotic warriors, a subject which I have written about in the past. The only thing which was really news to me was the fully-automatic shotgun (3:20). Scary stuff.

Over the past few months I’ve been seeing a few mentions of how universities might become obsolete recently. This is ridiculous, of course; it has been possible to learn this sort of material on your own for free since the public library was invented. What is clear, though, is that education is experiencing the first waves of disruption from the internet. After all, it’s one thing to read textbooks before bed, but nowadays I could get the books instantly, watch the lectures, and discuss the problems, even if I lived in the middle of nowhere and had to use solar panels and satellites to stay powered and wired. Hell, I could probably even do it if I didn’t speak English.

It reminds me of how the internet is disrupting books. Books aren’t going away; quite the opposite, in fact. But books can’t stay the same in the years to come. They translate too easily into bits, and the internet applies a constant pressure to serve up information as easily and cheaply as possible.

This power of the internet to push towards connection, collaboration and knowledge is probably my favorite trend right now. It’s something I can watch disrupt television, healthcare, politics, publishing, and yes, education, on a timeframe short enough for me to watch.

I’m sure Clay Shirky would agree.

UPDATE: Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom

I didn’t mention longevity research because I have mixed feeling about it. I support it heavily and will likely donate money to SENS in the future, but donation is not investment, and personal conviction is different from mass action.

The crux of my conflict is whether there is greater utility in putting money toward longevity or strong AI. I’ll assume, to start, that any strong AI created will be friendly. It seems reasonable to me that if we were to make an intelligence that is roughly as capable as a human, that we could very easily make an intelligence that is at least slightly better than a human. The conversion of intelligence into an information technology would, I predict, lead to a super-intelligence that is vastly better at solving problems than even all of humanity combined. If this is true (and such an AI is friendly), it seems to me like indefinite lifespan would be solved without any additional work by humanity.

So the questions then remaining are: Is the construction of a human-level intelligence possible? Will it happen soon? And is it worth fixing aging before hand, so that people don’t die/suffer in the meantime?

I’m going to, for simplicity, say that an “explosion of intelligence” like I described earlier will happen in 50 years if I don’t “invest” in it. I’ll talk about timeframes later. And for now, let’s pretend that longevity escape velocity (LEV) occurs 25 years from now without any of my investment.

Now lets say I buy 5 years of “progress” in longevity, so it happens only 20 years from now. I think it’s likely that within the first few decades of LEV, most of the change in life expectancy will come from wealthy old people in prosperous nations. I just saved and improved many lives, but not a whole bunch… probably under half a billion. Infectious and lifestyle diseases, accidents and wars still exist, and those who can’t afford treatment still die when they get old, even when AI shows up.

Now lets compare this with a 5 year acceleration of strong AI. Not only might superintelligence solve longevity, it might do it so well that it’s cheap and can be given to even the poorest. In addition, it’d (if friendly) probably negotiate peace treaties (perhaps by solving scarcity), cure other diseases and if Aubrey de Grey is right, prevent accidents.

This means that if the rate of acceleration per unit of investment is equal, I’d be weighing improvements to the lives (and avoidance of death) of the half-billion elite, versus the curing and protecting of the entire planet for an additional 5 years. I’ll pay for AI, thank you.

Right here is where I’d be balking, if I were reading this. I’ve made a number of assumptions, so I’ll try to go back over each one:

Who says the same amount of money buys the same amount of progress for both technologies!?

If AI is “cheaper,” my argument is even more sound, so I’ll address if the same investment unit buys AI progress only a fraction of the same acceleration as longevity. At some point it just makes sense to put money toward longevity and not AI. If, for example, strong AI can only be made by an uneducated kid in 2063, then no amount of research will speed that up. I have no reason to think this though. It seems to me that more money in a field typically means more people thinking about it, including students and amateurs. Both fields seem like they could benefit from more mainstream funding, and even at a 5-to-1 ratio, I think I’d prefer AI. (That is, I’d still invest in AI if it meant 1 year of acceleration, rather than 5 years of acceleration for longevity)

You can’t pay money to make technologies show up sooner!

You can’t?

Kurzweil has no game plan, while SENS is already in action!

Kurzweil is not the king of intelligent machines (even if he is the celebrity), so a better example might be “<Current leader in general AI> has no game plan”, which I cannot say. Remember that my example works even if strong AI happens several decades after longevity breakthroughs occur.

Who says strong AI is even possible? Or that it’d be any smarter than a human?

Nobody can be sure that either are possible until they happen. I happen to believe that human intelligence comes from nothing more than a system of organic machinery, so in theory that behavior would be able to be simulated. It seems to me that if we can simulate a human level intelligence, it’d be fairly simple to tweak the machinery (so to speak), and improve it, even if only a little at a time. I tend to think that you wouldn’t need to replicate the human nervous system verbatim as much as the general patterns of learning, but either way works.

Why would a super-intelligence be “friendly”? Why not ambivalent or aggressive?

Because we’re the ones making it. Making something that powerful is inherently dangerous, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in it. If anything, it means we should invest in the research, so that it’s done right, and not sloppily. I don’t see anything in this argument that makes researching AI any less attractive.

The timeframes are wrong because of X, Y, Z.

If super AI comes before longevity breakthroughs than that’s even worse for those who invested in longevity. If the time between the technologies is smaller than it seems like longevity gets less important as it becomes increasingly available to only the rich, etc. So what if AI is possible, but it shows up in a couple hundred years, while anti-aging happens soon? It’d probably be best to invest in longevity then, yes.

Conclusion: it seems to me that it’d be better to focus on longevity iff: super-intelligent AI is impossible, is only possible far in the future, or is not easily aided by having money thrown at it.

P.S. I wrote this in a fairly stream-of-consciousness way for a facebook comment. If anyone wants to point out edits that’d make it more akin to a paper, that’d be sweet. I’ll probably rewrite it a year from now when I can see just how stupid I’m being.

Related link: Aubrey de Grey on the Singularity and Longevity Escape Velocity

Web Data:


* Huge number of volunteers for genome database

Telepathy:
* “Force Trainer” toy provides MRI for kids.
* Implant wires motor cortex to computer.

“Green” tech:
* “Mission One” electric motorcycle goes 150mph, with a 150-mile range and an optimum charge time of 2 hours.

I’ve been thinking about the future of currency this evening, and oh! I made a quick little simulation of the Fibonacci sequence the other day.

Robotics confronts me continuously online, to the point where I cease to keep track. In terms of military equipment there is Ember, TROPHY, and the old news predator UAV, which I was unhappy to learn now advertises on Hulu (unable to find link, sorry).

More links abound. Seriously. I could do this all day.

Oh, and speaking of Hulu, there was an interview on the Colbert Report (last section) just the other day with Seth Shostak. At the very end of the interview (roughly 20:45), Dr. Shostak points out that the alien life that we make first contact with is likely to be “beyond-biology.” That is, that they’re likely to be AI.

I applaud the out of the box thinking on this one. Most sci-fi would have us in fist-fights with bipedal cat-people, and I think aliens have gotten a bit of a bad rep for it. (Apologies for picking on sci-fi, though. I do so love it.) But I really think that Shostak is wrong here. The biological systems that have evolved over the last three billion years are incredibly more complex and efficient than anything artificial, and I would even state that it is more efficient than anything we’re likely to develop in the next century.

Just for a second, imagine a nano-machine that communicated with other bots with a swarm network to create macroscopic effects, re-arrange in the swarm or repair itself. Now imagine that this machine not only could self-replicate, but could do so in a sustainable fashion with very little waste and even make small improvements upon itself. I just roughly described a biological cell.

Now, let me be very clear, computers and machinery are VERY useful, and capable of doing many things that organisms cannot. My point is simply that there are many things that both approaches cannot accomplish easily, and that the path of least resistance is in combining artifice with the vast amount of powerful organic machinery all around us. We already do this to an extent, where the newest microprocessors are created by applying the human brain in conjunction with present day computers, and where the newest human brains grow in an environment that is connected by technology. We cure disease and disability so that we can live happier lives, but as we do so we cease to exist as a purely biological species. And in that same way, I cannot believe that the machines of the future could not be at least partially organic.

The following (including music) is entirely the product of computer algorithms; a.k.a. procedurally generated content:

We’re getting closer to good brain-interfaces:

I think that the above video is the equivalent of watching a tech demo of cell phones in the late 1980s. Give it 20 years and it’ll be everywhere, give it 40 years and it’ll be unthinkable to control a computer with something other than the brain.

Other things that have been exiting for me:
* Exoplanets
* Exoskeletons
* Netbooks (more)

Take note: The collision between cellphones and personal computers is happening. A good amount of resistance to adopting netbooks probably comes from PC gaming (it certainly does for me) and lack of good cloud-based applications. These problems are being solved though, and I anticipate a full integration by 2015.

EDIT: Oh! I forgot this one!

“Dude. You’re teaching the machines to read. They’ll destroy us all!”

That was clearly in jest, but I’ve actually been fairly worried about future conflicts with machines. Seriously!
(Most of the following blog was also prompted by watching this TED talk. Warning: I re-state a lot of it.)

I do not, however, mean armed conflict with artificial minds, like the Terminator. I mean the slaughtering of noncombatants by robots controlled, at least in part, by other humans. This shouldn’t be in the least bit surprising. Humans have been using machines to kill each other for as long as they’ve been made, with the latest generation being fighter jets, helicopters and tanks. These are tools of war, and are incredibly powerful ones at that. I might even claim that these machines save lives by ending conflicts quickly and without putting their pilots in as much danger as the front lines might. That last argument is why I’m scared about the machine uprising.

In the early 20th century we predicted that robots would soon join us along with flying cars. Flying cars haven’t gotten here yet, but to a large degree robots have, they just aren’t in your living room (usually).

I find it a bit amusing, to be honest, the way Hollywood (and the game industry) seems fixated on the killer AI. While not an impossibility, the decision of an AI to kill off the only other sentient beings in contact with it seems both unlikely and quite far down the road. When the terminator shows up, he won’t be a humanoid AI with a heavy accent, he’ll be a real person controlling the equivalent of a 21st century tank — one without a driver.

Already in use for war are armed UAVs and their ground-treading counterparts, capable of killing without requiring a local pilot. DARPA is also hard at work pumping research funds into armored/robotic exoskeletons for the few humans that will need to be on the field. From medicine to reconnaissance to transport, robots undoubtedly will embed themselves in what it means for America to fight a war.

But the law of exponential growth (e.g. Moore’s law) means it won’t end there. Once we have exoskeletons, we’ll have the ability to make super-exoskeletons. Once the majority of front-line soldiers are machine it’ll become imperative that all of them are. Who needs human hands on the battlefield when metallic ones are superior? I’m not saying that battlefields will become devoid of human life, but that the roles of humans will become akin to people playing video games.

What becomes the target, in this future? What’s the point of it all? Do you aim for the factories, run by robots to make robots, or maybe the transport chains of autonomous vehicles delivering supplies to their mechanical pals. Do you aim for the HQ, and hope to track down something that could be anywhere on the planet? Do you attempt to outperform your opponent in the arms race and develop a virus or something equally devastating that lets you wipe out everything in one blow? Or do you aim for the population centers, and hope that a hostage city will force a surrender? The answer is none of the above, because modern warfare is dying alongside the newspaper industry as technology mercilessly reshapes our world.

The advance of technology has already majorly transformed the face of war twice by my count. The first was gunpowder, which destroyed the warrior caste, reshaped the fort and eventually made the idea of rigid formation laughable. The second was the atomic bomb,of which the consequences are not yet fully clear, but in my mind involve the development of proxy warfare. With proxy war comes terrorism, which I’ll define here as the unexpected killing of civilians by an organization (other than a nation) for the purposes of advancing an agenda.

If we think about how advancing robotics effects terrorism, this is where things really get ugly to me. The gift of an unmanned vehicle is that the human life of the pilot can be spared–but what if the UAV’s goal is to fly into a building? As the role of humans in war becomes that of chess players rather than pawns, it becomes largely possible for a single man to wage war. And as the fires of industry continue to burn, we’ll become increasingly more helpless to resist. The only solution will be to have no enemies or to turn to our computers to save us by hiding us away from an unseen threat that could be anywhere. It’s an awful lot like the possible future of biological weaponry. It’s an awful lot like the possible future of a black market for portable nuclear weapons.

Don’t fear the machine. Fear the maker.

I watch just about every TED video that’s released, but this one really struck me. One of the most important things about the web is the way it promotes the increase of wealth by sharing information. The typical lack of fees for most content also means that the wealth generated (as the information spreads) effects everyone, rich and poor, alike. But the web is made to be human-readable. Each page is tailored by human hands for human eyes, and so while a good amount of information is being shared to the people around the world, teaching a machine to learn from the web is quite difficult. Indeed, breakthroughs in this sector have the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with our computers.

On the human side the result means that I can get meaningful results when I search for factual questions and I can clarify who or what I’m searching about without adding additional query items. On the machine side, this means that more projects like gap-minder can aggregate meaningful data. In collecting all of human knowledge into a machine-readable format we also empower proto-artificial intelligence to perceive the world by translating it into easily digestible information.

When I get to thinking about the possibilities I am overwhelmed by the wealth of knowledge that, as Mr. Berners-Lee puts it, is “unlocked” by this course of action. In doing this, we will make ourselves even richer, and by “we” I mean the entire species.