As a long-time IEEE member, I was not impressed with the article.  Although there are plenty of quotes from Ralph, it gets some facts wrong (there aren’t “thousands” of people who’ve been suspended, Alcor is not a “company”).  Worse, the only people they found to present any skeptical comments are one retired philosopher and one retired psychiatrist.  I thought this was a technology publication?  Sigh.  —Chris Peterson

If that’s your goal, you’ll want to be in Boston on May 17-21 for PEGS 2010, “the essential protein engineering summit”.

Not sure if this is your pathway? Just reading the talk titles is educational. And they have great testimonials from past attendees.  —Chris Peterson

In case anyone wonders where I’ve gone, I’m resigning from Foresight for medical reasons (adhesive capsulitis — long and painful course of therapy) and to concentrate my few remaining neurons on my AI research.  I really wish nanomedicine had advanced further in the interim

Among other things, we’ll be unveiling a preliminary take on the AGI Roadmap (of which Foresight is a sponsor).

It was thus somewhat surprising, yet gratifying, to find them submitting quite a strongly-worded critique of practices in climatology that echo some of the concerns I’ve mentioned here about the impact of the shennanigans on the credibility of science as a whole:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.
…

6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the
e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific ’self correction’, which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.

…
10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.

My backyard under ~ 1 m of snow

It’s been snowing continuously here for about 2 days.  The heaviest snows I’ve experienced in my life (for any significant amount of time) were an inch an hour, but this has been half that — amounting to a foot a day.

If it were to keep snowing like this for a week, it would be a major emergency; if for a month, the area would become uninhabitable.

As usual, people who disbelieve in global warming point at the record snow coverage extents this year and say they disprove it.  As usual, people who are global warming supporters claim that global warming is causing the snow.

GCMs tend to have forecast lower snow cover with rising global temperature, indicating a positive albedo feedback.  That much seems clearly wrong.  On the other hand, it’s not totally counterintuitive that rising energy input in the tropics could cause more evaporation, feeding more water into an atmospheric conveyor leading to more snow in the cold places.  This could actually form a negative feedback in the climate system, putting an upper limit on global temperatures.  There has to be some kind of such a limit, since something appears to stop the positive feedback loop (between temperature and CO2) that drives the exponential takeoff out of ice ages into interglacials.

Anyway, snow.  Whatever the reason, we’re about 3 months of what it’s doing right this minute from an ice age.  I don’t have a clue how likely this is to happen how soon, but looking at the last million years of climate, ice age is the normal condition of Earth and interglacials are few and far between.

We can only hope we’ve had the sense to develop real nanotech before we’re back in one.

As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has been that aliens are peaceful zero-population-growth no-nuke greens, since we all know that any other sort quickly destroy themselves.  This seems to me an instructive example of how badly a supposed “deep theory” inside-view of the future can fail, relative to closest-related-track-record outside-view.  As Brin says, the track record of contact between cultures, species, and biomes is not especially encouraging, and it is far too easy for far-view minds to overestimate the reliability of theoretical arguments to the contrary.

In fact, it’s a lot worse than that.  As far as I can tell, nobody talking about interstellar contact has a model even vaguely close to a reasonable analysis of the situation.  Short form: these discussions are the equivalent of the natives of a Polynesian island deciding who shall be allowed to wave as the galleons heave into view.  Our own technology, today, is getting close to detecting Earth-like planets around other stars, for heaven’s sake.  The galleons see the island, not the waving.  Scientific elites declaring moratoria on SETI transmissions are about as important to the future of the human race as whether we call Pluto a planet or a dwarf planet.  The discussions are entirely about political dominance among scientists, and nothing to do with reality.

Reality is that any alien race out there with whom we have any kind of physical contact at all is virtually certain to have (a) full-fledged nanotech, and (b) hyperhuman AI.  Given these capabilities, if they want to find Earth-like planets anywhere in the area of space they would have the physical capability of travelling to, they will find them. Period. Doesn’t matter whether we are standing on the shore waving or not.

Of course, that assumes they are interested in Earth-like planets in the first place.  Most commentators on the subject seem to be stuck in E. E. Smith’s universe, worrying about whether the aliens who notice us will be the (kindly, academic) Norlaminians or the (evil, rapacious) Fenachrone. The aliens, wearing bodies like ours (or at least some form of animal life) will have spaceships and spacesuits and takeoff and land on planets and basically act like people on ocean-going boats.

Star travel is expensive; it costs on the order of a ship’s own mass in equivalent energy to get it up to relativistic speeds. Any culture capable of that will be at least a Kardashev Type I civilization, and most likely a Type II.  And the reason they’ll be doing star travel is to work their way up towards Type III.  Any sentient creatures that actually get here will be nanotech-based robots, not water-based organisms.  They won’t have spacecraft, they’ll be spacecraft.  They will be unlikely interested in the carbon-poor mudballs of the inner solar system, but reap abundant carbon from the outer planets and carbonaceous asteroids to build Dyson-sphere-like structures around the orbit of Mercury.

We simply aren’t going to see less sophisticated visitors due to the starship paradox: send a starship out now with all Earth’s current technological resources behind it, and then wait and send one in 50 years with full nanotech.  The second one gets there first.

We aren’t going to see any less ambitious visitors due to simple evolution: in a universe where the ultimate meaning of “carbon footprint” is the total mass of the superintelligent diamondoid robots you’ve built, spaceships burning cellulosic ethanol simply aren’t going to be anywhere near the fittest.  Indeed, cultures that aren’t inherently aggressive and ambitious aren’t going to put the effort into sending out starships at all.  The question is, what are they going to think of us, the thin layer of green slime coating an insignificant rock?

If I were an aggressive superintelligent nanotech robot, I would tend to place the boundary between “people” and “raw material” at the boundary of aggressive superintelligent nanotech robots and everything else.  I might — just might — make a sentimental exception for intelligent organic species such as my ancestors.  “Such as” in this case means intelligent organic species which are on a clear track to building aggressive superintelligent nanotech robots.

Or, of course, has already done so.  If you really want them to show up as friendly neighbors, start working on that Dyson Sphere yourself.

If, on the other hand, you’re a culture that has elevated cowardice (“Precautionary Principle”) to be its highest virtue … you’re just dirt.

I’ve claimed that “I think we have the techniques now to build an AI at the hypo/dia border, equivalent to a dull but functional human.”  That doesn’t mean we have one now, or even that one is possible next year.  What it means is that by the kind of techniques we can now use to program self-driving cars, we could, with a major development effort, program an AI that would be able to do as broad a range of that kind of task as a very dull human can, but which would need additional programming to do new tasks.

Commenter Alex Kilpatrick put forward a cogent objection to the “AI is near” thesis, writing:

All of the so-called gains in AI are still a million miles away from the “dull but functional human” There are some things like playing chess that computers do really well. And intelligent humans do those things too. But that in no way means the computer is remotely intelligent.
The whole AI field is nothing but clever programming. Some of those programs are quite clever indeed, but they represent the intelligence of their creators, not the programs. Some programs may appear intelligent in very narrow domains, but they are extremely brittle — they will not be useful at all even on the borders of the domains for which they were designed.

I agree with this strongly as a description of the state of AI today in general, but with one major reservation.  Not entirely all of the AI field is nothing but clever programming.  The AI programs that do the most impressive application tasks certainly are — because the efforts to build general learning machines are less than babies at the moment.

The key to moving up from the hypo/dia border into the diahuman range is imitation.  I’d guess that the state of the art would let us build a machine that would be able to watch someone sweeping a room and be able to sweep the same room with more or less the same series of strokes, being brittle to changes in the furniture positions and so forth. (Consider the kind of learning demonstrated in Ng’s helicopter.)  Building an AI that could watch lots of sweeping and then be able to figure out on its own how to sweep a new room — without having been programmed with any knowledge of sweeping ahead of time — is the kind of thing we need to advance the state of the art.

The difference is that in the second case the AI is inferring a model and a program from observations.  But this is what 21st century AI is (already) all about — typically, today, inferring statistical models from reams and reams of observations, but at least tackling the right problem.  The main thing that will determine the rate of advance is how much of the clever programming goes directly into end applications and how much goes into basic core learning.

Concept formation, model building, program inference, and so on are a quantum step harder than parameter tuning in a known ontology.  However, the math for that kind of thing is advancing, and the processing power to use techniques such as search and GAs is on its way in the next decade.  I don’t think we’ll have a superintelligent AI by 2020; indeed, I don’t think we’ll even have one that can educate itself by reading Wikipedia.  But I do think it’s at least a 50% chance we’ll have AIs that can learn something by a combination of imitation and careful verbal coaching.

Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Diamond Trees (Tropostats):  A Molecular Manufacturing Based System for Compositional Atmospheric Homeostasis,” IMM Report 43, 10 February 2010

Abstract. The future technology of molecular manufacturing will enable long-term sequestration
of atmospheric carbon in solid diamond products, along with sequestration of lesser masses of
numerous air pollutants, yielding pristine air worldwide ~30 years after implementation. A
global population of 143 x 10^9 20-kg “diamond trees” or tropostats, generating 28.6 TW of
thermally non-polluting solar power and covering ~0.1% of the planetary surface, can create and
actively maintain compositional atmospheric homeostasis as a key step toward achieving
comprehensive human control of Earth’s climate.