The H+ Summit is a two day event that explores how humanity will be radically changed by technology in the near future. Visionary speakers will explore the potential of technology to modify your body, mind, life, and world.

What will it mean to be a human in this next phase of technological development? How can we prepare now for coming changes?

We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition and overcoming such constraints as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, lack of resources, and our confinement to the planet earth. The possibilities are broad and exciting. The H+ Summit will provide a venue to discuss these future scenarios and to hear exciting presentations by the leaders of the ongoing H+ (r)evolution.

I was at their December 2009 conference in southern California and it was great.  They’re planning another one for December 2010, again in southern California.  —Chris Peterson

Freitas is quoted:

I enjoyed the book.  It’s a good read.  The ending has a neat wrap-up with almost all the loose ends nicely taken care of.

Chapter 1 is free online.  Happy leisure reading!  —Chris Peterson

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.

The reason, of course, is that understanding nanotech means that the all the classic SF projections become so piddling and simplistic in comparison that any story set after, say, 2050, looks ridiculously anachronistic, as if it had been written by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells.

The more technologically advanced the presentation of SF gets, as in the technical tour-de-force of CGI that is Avatar, the wierder this double-exposure sense of “what universe was this written in” gets.  I won’t go into the very hackneyed plot — Dvorsky has a nice review here — or how a presumably star-faring civilization (the humans) happens to still be using Vietnam-era military technology (why aren’t the fighting machines at least teleoperated, or more likely, AIs?), or even why they aren’t mining the floating mountains for the antigravity mineral.  And who bred the Smurfs with the Gentle Tasaday?  (My guess is that Cameron is angling for an Oscar and wrote the story to appeal to the Gaian sensibilities of the Hollywood elite.)

Avatar isn’t anywhere near real SF — it’s fantasy.  Let’s take it on those terms.

But the thing about the movie as a whole that struck me was that that beautiful, gorgeous, magical world … was entirely artificial.  Synthetic.  Made up. Every single bit and pixel. Produced by a corporation using lots of expensive machines. We are standing at the dawn of the era where the worlds we can produce are better than the natural one we happen to have evolved in.  Storytellers always did that in the imagination;  now we can do it in photorealistic detail.  With nanotech, we’ll be able to do it with atoms instead of bits.  This century.  If you like it you can live there.  But only if we build it.

The blogosphere has been abuzz over the past week or so with the release of data — emails and program source and documentation — from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the premier climatology research institutions in the world. Those with an interest have doubtless read much more about it than you will read here, but the nutshell version is that skeptics maintain that the emails show that the climatologists have been falsifying data and running a scam, and the mainstream claims that this is just the way science is always done, scientists are after all human. Robin Hanson points out that “If you knew how academia worked, this news would not surprise you nor change your opinions on global warming.”

I think that Robin is right that no one should be surprised. But I have a couple of observations about the nature of science and scientists:

First, scientists don’t really go out into the world with a blank mind and allow the data to suggest new laws of nature to them. Scientists — the ones who make significant breakthroughs anyway — go out with a paradigm firmly fixed in their minds and look for data to prove it. The paradigm is produced by subconscious processes of scientific intuition.

The classic case where this was made public because a top scientist was honest with himself in his notebooks, and these were subsequently published, was Millikan and the oil drop experiments to determine the charge of the electron.

It is plausible to suggest that Ehrenhaft’s methodology approximated the traditional scientific method, which did not allow him to discard anomalous data. Millikan, on the other hand, in his publications espoused the scientific method but in private (handwritten notebooks) was fully aware of the dilemma faced and was forced to select data to uphold his presuppositions.

A model of why this is the way things really work is the satisfiablity problem in computer science. The problem is to find values for variables that give a true value to a logical expression. If you can guess the right values, it’s simple to evaluate the expression and show they’re right. Otherwise, you are left with an intractable search. Similarly in science, guessing the right answer and then proving it is usually the way things really work.

In the Climategate files, it’s clear that the climatologists have a predetermined paradigm and are trying to prove it. The skeptics claim that’s evidence of a scam, but I think that by and large, climatologists really believe the paradigm they’re pushing, and they’re “selecting data to uphold their presuppositions.”

On the other hand, because science really does work this way, it is even more important than would be the case in the naive view, that there be a strong devil’s advocate function and that replication be required before any results are accepted. Here I think the climatologists are on shakier ground.

Science is at its base a way of convincing people that something you believe is true. It says, if you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Do the experiment, do the math. Any reasonable person will have to come to the same conclusion I did. There are other modes of persuasion: the religious (if you don’t believe me, you’ll go to Hell), the political (if you don’t believe me, you’ll be fired/jailed/shot), and the social (everybody else believes this, if you don’t you’re a kook). The other modes are much more deep-seated in the human psyche and held sway for much longer than the relatively few centuries of modern science. Thus when climatologists act all too human, they run the risk of slipping into other modes of persuasion and losing the claim to be doing science.

We didn’t need the Climategate papers to know that the climatologists were refusing to publish their data and their models. This turns the idea of science on its head. Instead of “here’s what I did, try it yourself” we have “not only is my data secret, my theory (the computer model) is secret.” This does not inspire confidence.

Science convinces by letting the critics have all the advantages and take their best shots. If a theory is true, it will still stand. If a theory is protected instead by the other modes of persuasion, it’s suspect.

There is, in the age of the internet, absolutely no reason that science can’t be open source. Let, for example, tree-ring or temperature-station data be placed on the web — the real, raw data, not after someone adjusts and interprets it. Let all the codes representing theories be open source. After all, most of this stuff is paid for with tax money in the first place. Let anyone read it, interpret it, make new or variant theories in the form of statistical or simulation codes. Ideas, like iron, are best formed when they are subjected to lots of heat and beaten on.

Climategate probably won’t have a lot of effect on climate science per se, but if it moves it, and science in general, even a little bit in a more open-source direction, that’ll be something to be thankful for this week.

But I wonder if that’s such a good idea. Destructive technologies generally seem to come along sooner than constructive ones—we got war rockets before missile interceptors, and biological warfare before antibiotics. This suggests that there will be a window of vulnerability between the time when we develop technologies that can do dangerous things, and the time when we can protect against those dangers. The slower we move, the longer that window may remain open, leaving more time for the evil, the unscrupulous or the careless to wreak havoc. My conclusion? Faster, please.

OK, it’s counterintuitive, but it may be right.  —Chris Peterson

So, how close are we to flying cars? For specificity, let’s pick a technological bar to hurdle that answers most of the objections to the concept we’ve seen as comments on the previous posts:

• It should be relatively high-powered compared to current light craft.
• It should be STOVL for safety and convenience.
• It should be quiet enough to operate in residential neighborhoods.
• It should fly itself, without piloting from the passengers.
• It should be self-maintaining.
• It should be inexpensive enough for widespread ownership.

Now I claim that current technology is, more or less, up to the first 4 of these. But the corner of the technological envelope that we are pushed into in order to satisfy them makes the last 2 that much harder.

Flying cars are a really good example of the sort of Jetson’s futuristic world that nanotech and AI together could enable, but would be essentially impossible without both. They are something that’s right on the edge of what’s possible with current technology, but current technology falls short in three crucial areas:

Power

Although Maxim arguably built a steam-powered flying machine in the 1890′s, practical powered flight had to wait for the gasoline internal-combustion engine. By WWII, piston engines had been pushed to the limit, and the second half of the 20th century saw serious flight powered by gas turbines. In optimal regimes (e.g. at high altitudes where the air is really cold) and at high compression ratios, the Brayton cycle can get up to 50% thermodynamic efficiency. This is quite good for a heat engine on Earth but with a eutactic molecular mill that didn’t thermalize the potential energy we could get close to 100%. (Fuel cells fall somewhere in between.)

I won’t speculate on specifics, but there are enough alternatives being explored that it seems likely that we may be able to replace not only heat engines but chemical fuels sometime in the coming century. (OK, I’ll mention a couple: stimulated alpha emission from long-lived radioisotopes, or proton-boron to triple-alpha fusion/fission. These produce energetic charged particles which convert directly to electricity without needing a heat engine.) Advances like this could be of as much benefit in the twenty-first century as the IC engine was in the twentieth.

Intelligence

Most of the actual advances of AI you hear about these days is about laboriously constructed programs that get better and better at various tasks, slowly approaching human performance (e.g. at driving cars). Most of the futurist hype you hear is about superintelligence erupting and taking over the world. As you can readily imagine, the reality of future AI will be somewhere in between.

The major difference between AIs today and those of ten years from now will be that the future ones will be able to learn skills on their own that must be added now by extensive, and expensive, programming. That means that the ability to fly a car — and to maintain one — will be learned as a human would, so it’s robust in the face of unexpected situations. Flying-car AIs, like all AIs, will exchange experiences and techniques. Each one will be as expert as any one. In the medium term, this will be the major impact of AI: that expertise equivalent to the world’s best will be available cheaply to all practitioners.

Manufacturing

Futurists such as H. G. Wells managed to forsee everything about the automobile except the single, but crucial, fact that everybody would be able to have one. But that is the fact that made all the difference. In the twentieth century it was Henry Ford and mass production that was the enabler; in the twenty-first it will probably be nanotech and autogenous manufacturing. This is easiest to understand in economic terms: the price of things depends on productivity, which in turn depends on capital replication rates. That doesn’t necessarily mean the time it takes a factory to make another physical factory, so much as for a factory to make stuff worth what it cost to build the factory.

This is why nanotech scaling laws are so important. Operation frequencies scale with the inverse of size, so bacteria reproduce in hours while humans take decades. Harnessing this productivity accelerator into the industrial loop means that costs of physical goods — particularly high-complexity high-tech goods — can begin to fall along the Moore’s Law curve we already see for electronics.

Bottom line: A flying car with the flight envelope I talk about could be built today but it’d cost a million bucks. One with all the capabilities you’d want will be available in 10 years, but you’ll still have to be rich to get one. Flying cars for the masses will be technically and economically possible in 20 years, if the political will is there to let it happen.

By the way, contra the widespread impression that Heinlein was a hidebound conservative, note that the plot of Waldo is about a big corporation which steals Waldo’s patent and establishes a monopoly on transmitted power in a way that causes a widespread health problem, and how Waldo fights the monopoly and cures the health problem. Indeed his construction of a series of ever-smaller waldoes is with the goal of being able to operate on individual nerve cells.

… Neither electromagnetic instruments nor neural surgery was refined enough to do accurate work on the levels he wished to investigate.
But he had waldoes.
The smallest waldoes he had used up to this time were approximately half an inch across their palms–with micro scanners to match, of course. They were much too gross for his purpose. …
He used the waldoes to create tinier ones. …
His final team of waldoes used for nerve and brain surgery varied in succeeding stages from mechanical hands nearly life size down to these fairy digits which could manipulate things much too small for the eye to see. They were mounted in bank to work in the same locus. Waldo controlled them all from the same primaries; he could switch from one size to another without removing his gauntlets. The same change in circuits which brought another size of waldoes under control automatically accomplished the change in sweep of scanning to increase or decrease the magnification so that Waldo always saw before him in his stereo reciever a “life-size” image of his other hands.

Note that Heinlein even addresses, in an offhand science-fiction kind of way, the problem of seeing what you are doing at smaller scales. But that’s all. It’s an idea, not a detailed plan of any kind.
But it seems very likely that Feynman would have read Waldo or known about it. In the period between 1942 (Waldo) and 1959 (Plenty of Room), telemanipulators were built, used in the nuclear industry as Feynman mentions in his talk, and widely referred to as waldoes.
(H/t to Perry Metzger.)

Let it be noted that I’ve had a few drinks with Charlie, and he is a pleasant, engaging, and very intelligent guy, and writes really excellent science fiction. But I have a bone or two to pick with his FAQ.

Q: What can we expect?
A: Pretty much what you read about in New Scientist every week. Climate change, dust bowls caused by over-cultivation necessitated by over-population, resource depletion …

How well would someone in the “aughts” have predicted the 20th century by reading, say, Popular Mechanics?

There were, in fact, a couple of things that could be viewed as predictions with the benefit of hindsight, such as aerial bombardment and snowmobiles:

But PM didn’t really even predict the airplane; they just reported it. This cover is from 1910:

But the key thing you would have picked up was the general sense of technological excitement and optimism. It was the zeitgeist then. If you go to the New Scientist now, you’ll see a lot of the same kind of gee-whiz kind of stuff, but served up with today’s zeitgeist instead: currently fashionable doom and gloom.

This zeitgeist is captured in the mood and tone of the movies that are evoked by this quip of Paul Graham:

It’s hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts.

So here’s the really interesting question: Compared to the people in 1900, we live a lot longer. We’re healthier. We’re enormously richer. We have an almost incredibly greater array of choices available to us, ranging from what kind of food we want to eat, where we want to travel, what kind of lifestyle we want to live, and on and on and on.

So why are we the pessimists and they the optimists?

One part of the explanation is hinted at by this graph. This looks just like the kind of thing you’re used to seeing in these futuristic essays, perhaps showing Moore’s Law or other exponential trend:

But this one is not technology: it’s the rate of indictable offenses in England and Wales, taken from this report by the British government. The crime rates are roughly 50 times as high at the end of the 20th century than at the beginning. (Note that the US is not any better, but the graph is confounded by lots of noise such as the enormous crime wave in the early part of the century caused by Prohibition.)

No, I’m not suggesting that the crime rate is causing people to be pessimistic, per se. What I am suggesting is that the rate is an indicator, a proxy, for something in society that was right in 1900, and has gone wrong at an accelerating pace across the 20th century.

Charlie writes:

The big picture is that since around 2005, the human species has — for the first time ever — become a predominantly urban species. Prior to that time, the majority of humans lived in rural/agricultural lifestyles. Since then, just over 50% of us now live in cities; the move to urbanization is accelerating. If it continues at the current pace, then some time after 2100 the human population will tend towards the condition of the UK — in which roughly 99% of the population live in cities or suburbia.

This is going to affect everything.

Nope — it already did affect everything. Charlie’s stat is worldwide; the transition is largely done in the industrialized nations.

Is urbanization what has “gone wrong” and made us so pessimistic? People certainly feel safer in rural than urban areas. Cities are noisy, ugly and unnatural, constructed primarily of hard unliving stuff that’s usually dingy.

But they don’t have to be. It’s possible to construct high-density living areas that are pleasant, comfortable, and safe. It’s just expensive. But the continued increase in productivity we should see in the 21st century would make it possible to do that for everyone — but only if we see that as a goal and ditch the defeatist zeitgeist. Things “gone wrong” can be identified, understood, and fixed — or at least worked on. Optimism may be unfashionable, but it’s not unwarranted.

Here’s Charlie again:

Q: Space colonization?
A: Forget it.

Q: The Singularity?
A: Forget it.

(Together with an explanation that what he means is that they won’t affect 99+% of humanity if they do happen.)

I’d agree with the space colonization if we assume today’s technology. But that’s like predicting, in 1909, that 99% of humans would be unaffected by air travel, based on the range and capacity of the Wright Flyer. But I think that nanotech — real nanotech — is capable of most of what would be needed. And it’s silly to imagine that basic physics has just stopped and there will be no more fundamental discoveries.

As far as the Singularity is concerned, Charlie’s notion of it is not the same as mine, so arguing this point would be a case of talking past each other. But I will strongly claim that an AI/nanotech revolution that kicks the economy into a growth mode that looks like Moore’s Law, “is going to affect everything.”

The great challenge of the 21st century is going to be to make our large-scale systems — from cities to economies to the global ecosystem — work properly. The political structures we use to run things now are incompetent. Nanotech will help. AI will help more.

What happens in the 21st century depends entirely on what we do. Two centuries ago flying was a ridiculously impossible dream. Today you can hop on a plane and cross the continent in hours. The difference is that one century ago a lot of people were possessed by a vision of flight, and worked like crazy to make it come true.

The same is true of all the possibilities we can see, from nanotech to AI, from SENS to powersats. None of this will happen if we just sit around whining and moping. Alan Kay said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” But the only way to live in the future you’ve invented, is to build it.

I think that, for me, nanotech has been a metaphor for the power of thought, and for the power of language. This may sound odd, but it seems that the more we understand matter and the more we are able to manipulate it and to make decisions about how and why to do so, the better we understand ourselves.

Well put! Oddly, some seem to feel that knowing the physical world better — including our own brains/minds — undermines something wonderful about being human. This has always seemed wrong to me. It just gets more and more exciting as we learn more, and appreciate more, just how amazing living things are. —Christine