Will Our Computers Love Us In The Future?

Or, will our computers become self-programming super intelligences who decide to kill us all.  A leader and expert in the development of Artificial General Intelligence in machines, Dr. Ben Goertzel wrote on his blog The Multiverse According to Ben last October (reposted at the Singularity Hub) why he concludes that it is unlikely that AGI, which will pass up human intelligence in the coming decades, referred to by some observers as the Singularity, will conclude that humans are no longer needed and in the words of Dr. Goertzel, decide to "repurpose our molecules for it's own ends".

In his blog post, Dr. Goertzel argues that the fear that unrestricted development of AGI will lead to an artificial intelligence which does not value humanity's right to exist, a concept he calls the Scary Idea, while possible is highly unlikely, even though he acknowledges that the odds are impossible to estimate.


The argument for the Scary Idea has been floating around science fiction for a long time.  Dr. Goertzel, while disagreeing with the premise, doesn't pretend as if there isn't a basis for the Scary Idea, at least in part.

Please note that, although I don't agree with the Scary Idea, I do agree that the development of advanced AGI has significant risks associated with it. There are also dramatic potential benefits associated with it, including the potential of protection against risks from other technologies (like nanotech, biotech, narrow AI, etc.). So the development of AGI has difficult cost-benefit balances associated with it -- just like the development of many other technologies.

I also agree with Nick Bostrom and a host of SF writers and many others that AGI is a potential "existential risk" -- i.e. that in the worst case, AGI could wipe out humanity entirely. I think nanotech and biotech and narrow AI could also do so, along with a bunch of other things.

I certainly don't want to see the human race wiped out! I personally would like to transcend the legacy human condition and become a transhuman superbeing … and I would like everyone else to have the chance to do so, if they want to. But even though I think this kind of transcendence will be possible, and will be desirable to many, I wouldn't like to see anyone forced to transcend in this way. I would like to see the good old fashioned human race continue, if there are humans who want to maintain their good old fashioned humanity, even if other options are available

As Dr. Goertzel sees it, the Scary Idea has four main points.

As far as I can tell from discussions and the available online material, some main ingredients of peoples’ reasons for believing the Scary Idea are ideas like:

1. If one pulled a random mind from the space of all possible minds, the odds of it being friendly to humans (as opposed to, e.g., utterly ignoring us, and being willing to repurpose our molecules for its own ends) are very low
2. Human value is fragile as well as complex, so if you create an AGI with a roughly-human-like value system, then this may not be good enough, and it is likely to rapidly diverge into something with little or no respect for human values
3. “Hard takeoffs” (in which AGIs recursively self-improve and massively increase their intelligence) are fairly likely once AGI reaches a certain level of intelligence; and humans will have little hope of stopping these events
4. A hard takeoff, unless it starts from an AGI designed in a “provably Friendly” way, is highly likely to lead to an AGI system that doesn’t respect the rights of humans to exist

I emphasize that I am not quoting any particular thinker associated with SIAI here. I’m merely summarizing, in my own words, ideas that I’ve heard and read very often from various individuals associated with SIAI.

If you put the above points all together, you come up with a heuristic argument for the Scary Idea. Roughly, the argument goes something like: If someone builds an advanced AGI without a provably Friendly architecture, probably it will have a hard takeoff, and then probably this will lead to a superhuman AGI system with an architecture drawn from the vast majority of mind-architectures that are not sufficiently harmonious with the complex, fragile human value system to make humans happy and keep humans around.

The proponents of this argument come from members of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI).  Their idea is a derivative of physicist and science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov's idea of the Three Laws of Robotics. where artificial intelligence was embodied in the form of robots.


The Three Laws of Robotics are as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

SIAI argues that widespread AGI development should be curtailed until the development of "provably non-dangerous AGI" or friendly AGI can be developed.  Where Goertzel seems to disagree is not on the question of the need for creating ways to engineer AGI software to ensure friendliness towards humanity.  His argument is that we can do both at the same time.

I agree that AGI ethics is a Very Important Problem. But I doubt the problem is most effectively addressed by theory alone. I think the way to come to a useful real-world understanding of AGI ethics is going to be to

• build some early-stage AGI systems, e.g. artificial toddlers, scientists’ helpers, video game characters, robot maids and butlers, etc.
• study these early-stage AGI systems empirically, with a focus on their ethics as well as their cognition
• in the usual manner of science, attempt to arrive at a solid theory of AGI intelligence and ethics based on a combination of conceptual and experimental-data considerations
• humanity collectively plots the next steps from there, based on the theory we find: maybe we go ahead and create a superhuman AI capable of hard takeoff, maybe we pause AGI development because of the risks, maybe we build an “AGI Nanny” to watch over the human race and prevent AGI or other technologies from going awry. Whatever choice we make then, it will be made based on far better knowledge than we have right now.

So what’s wrong with this approach?  

Nothing, really — if you hold the views of most AI researchers or futurists. There are plenty of disagreements about the right path to AGI, but wide and implicit agreement that something like the above path is sensible.

But, if you adhere to SIAI’s Scary Idea, there’s a big problem with this approach — because, according to the Scary Idea, there’s too huge of a risk that these early-stage AGI systems are going to experience a hard takeoff and self-modify into something that will destroy us all.

But I just don’t buy the Scary Idea.

I do see a real risk that, if we proceed in the manner I’m advocating, some nasty people will take the early-stage AGIs and either use them for bad ends, or proceed to hastily create a superhuman AGI that then does bad things of its own volition. These are real risks that must be thought about hard, and protected against as necessary. But they are different from the Scary Idea. And they are not so different from the risks implicit in a host of other advanced technologies.

Dr. Goertzel concludes that the benefit in the development of AGI is in it's role as an agent of change which contributes to bio-technology, nanotechnology, as well as other emerging technologies which will provide solutions to the myriad of problems we face, but also act to protect us from the risks and dangers of those technologies as well.

I think that to avoid actively developing AGI, out of speculative concerns like the Scary Idea, would be an extremely bad idea.

That is, rather than “if you go ahead with an AGI when you’re not 100% sure that it’s safe, you’re committing the Holocaust,” I suppose my view is closer to “if you avoid creating beneficial AGI because of speculative concerns, then you’re killing my grandma” !! (Because advanced AGI will surely be able to help us cure human diseases and vastly extend and improve human life.)

So perhaps I could adopt the slogan: “You don’t have to kill my grandma to avoid the Holocaust!” … but really, folks… Well, you get the point….

Humanity is on a risky course altogether, but no matter what I decide to do with my life and career (and no matter what Bill Joy or Jaron Lanier or Bill McKibben, etc., write), the race is not going to voluntarily halt technological progress. It’s just not happening.

We just need to accept the risk, embrace the thrill of the amazing time we were born into, and try our best to develop near-inevitable technologies like AGI in a responsible and ethical way.

The either/or arguments about an AGI which either helps us become superhuman or decides to destroy humanity leaves a lot of room between the two poles for many other outcomes.  A concept floated in the 1980 novel, Mockingbird, revolved around the idea of compassionate computer super intelligences which act as a caretaker for an illiterate and drug addled human race in a final decline towards extinction.  With an already measurable negative impact of internet and computer technology on literacy rates and vocabularies, this outcome also bears contemplation.  


The problem, in my own opinion, in speculating on the impact of any particular technology, whether it is artificial intelligence, bio-technology, nano-technology, or any other emerging technology, is that they will all be impacting each other in ways impossible to predict.  I think that in the short term, Goertzel's fears of near AGI being used by humans to leverage other technologies to cause harm to other humans is probably the greatest danger we face in our future.  


In fact, near AGI isn't a requirement.  Human beings themselves are fully capable of causing great mischief using the software we have now.  A cyber worm, such as the Stuxnet worm released into the internet to attack elements of the Iranian Nuclear development infrastructure, which was unleashed on our power grids could lead to real negative outcomes, including death, for vast numbers of people.  In the case of Stuxnet, the NY Times reports that it was aimed at two elements of the Iranian nuclear power/weapons program, the centrifuges used to enrich uranium and the steam turbine at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant.  If someone were to do our power grid a similar favor, it would be a very bad thing for us, even if we suffered only a collapse of a regional power grid for an extended time.  Just one example of how software may run amok in our near future, which hardly requires the advent of artificial intelligence.


We live in interesting times.  

Technology and Know Nothing-ism Conspire To Make America Dumber. That Is Not A Good Thing.

For my entire lifetime the "controversy" surrounding Darwin's theories on the evolution of a species being driven by biological adaptation of a species to constantly changing environments has bewildered me.  As far as I comprehend that certain sub-cultures, particularly those of conservative religious fundamentalists, reject evolution from what I can only discern as a perceived threat to religious dogma, I don't understand how those attitudes persist, even though it seems to me that understanding the mechanism of an evolutionary process in no way disproves a guiding hand if that's what they are worried about.  I, for one, can not diffinitively discern the hand of God from random chance.  What is alarming me now is how this rejection of knowledge is metastasizing into the wider culture.  Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, you just didn't see major figures on credible news and opinion media endorsing the rejection of knowledge and science as Glenn Beck did the other day.  The impact of Beck's endorsement of Know Nothing rejection of evolution is not just in undermining the undermining of future generations ability to compete in the scientific advancements required to keep the United States competitive in the information technology world, (DNA is simply molecularly encoded information.)  it undermines our future ability to compete on all scientific fronts.  The goal of this growing power in our society aims not educational excellence, but rather requiring educational adherence to sub-cultural dogma.  What was the proclaimed basis for Beck's rejection of science?  The fact that he has never seen a half-man half-ape.  That's right folks.

"I think that's ridiculous. I haven't seen a half-monkey, half-person yet. Did evolution just stop? There's no other species that is developing into half-human?"

Blogger Steve Bennen at the Washington Monthly looked back today at past comments of President Obama regarding how the rest of the world looks at the importance of education.

This got me thinking about a story President Obama told about a year ago, after he returned from a trip to Asia. He shared an anecdote about a luncheon he attended with the president of South Korea.

"I was interested in education policy -- they've grown enormously over the last 40 years," Obama said. "And I asked him, 'What are the biggest challenges in your education policy?' He said, 'The biggest challenge that I have is that my parents are too demanding.' He said, 'Even if somebody is dirt poor, they are insisting that their kids are getting the best education.' He said, 'I've had to import thousands of foreign teachers because they're all insisting that Korean children have to learn English in elementary school.' That was the biggest education challenge that he had, was an insistence, a demand from parents for excellence in the schools.

"And the same thing was true when I went to China. I was talking to the mayor of Shanghai, and I asked him about how he was doing recruiting teachers, given that they've got 25 million people in this one city. He said, 'We don't have problems recruiting teachers because teaching is so revered and the pay scales for teachers are actually comparable to doctors and other professions. '

"That gives you a sense of what's happening around the world. There is a hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning. That used to be what we were about."

Which brings me to speculate on whether or not there is some mathematical curve the collective intelligence of a society moves on which might correlate with that societies rise and fall on other measures.  Would it be a leading indicator or a trailing one?  Is it driven by a Poverty of Affluence, or is the growing energy of the Know Nothing crowd driven by other factors, such as a growing unease with the rapid pace of technology?  The differences are stark when you consider that China has more english speaking engineers and scientists graduating from their universities than we have graduating in the United States, especially when you factor in the large percentage of foreign born students we have graduating at post graduate levels from American Universities.  What ever the variables at work it seems as if much of the world is on the upward slope of the curve while we seem to be on the downward slope.

Speaking of the rapid pace of technology, a recent article from MIT's Technology Review, The Ultimate Persuasion Device, speculated on the negative impact on our collective intelligence by the evolution of smart phones into a super iPhone social networking and social information device will have on the near future.

TR: In your book, America is a post-literate society and we lost the ability to interact directly with one another. Did technology lead us to this point? 

GS: In the book there are many culprits. I think technology can be construed as one culprit but I think the main culprit is the fact that we are getting dumber. Whether technology enables this or not is an open question. But compared, relative to other countries in the world, we are constantly on the way down in terms of our scores in a wide variety of things.

This may not be so evident obviously at MIT because the whole world comes to the Institute to get educated, but in terms of primary education, things are really bad.

What's interesting is one study that the Times recently published about-- children's vocabularies are shrinking because their parents are constantly texting and typing away and they don't have enough time to just communicate to the child.

So that's something that really intrigued me and felt like it was already part of this world.

Maybe just as technology creates a problem, it may also create a solution.  Perhaps the solution will be dolls running artificial intelligence programs and faces with the capacity for expressing emotion which take over the role of teaching children to communicate and read.  Whatever the solution, be it cultural or be it technological, we need it now, not later.

Weekly Address: Solar Power and Clean Energy Economy

We have a stark choice.  Policies which incentivize the development of new energy technologies and the industries and jobs they create or drilling, further deregulation and tax breaks for the oil industry.  Each path leads to it's own particular future.  The election in the fall matters.

I Have A Nightmare

I just don't get it. When I wonder about how the conservative group mind has so much mis-information floating around in it, I have to remember the source of the mis-information.  As Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly noted on Beck's Restore America 2010 rally held at the Lincoln Memorial:

The folks who gathered in D.C. today were awfully excited about something. The fact that it's not altogether obvious what that might be probably isn't a good sign.

Hello Iris. Welcome To The Future.

A world where everyone knows your name may be just around the corner.  Within the next decade the time may com when employers, hospitals, stores and banks, not to mention law enforcement, will know your identity as soon as you walk through their doors.  They will read it in your eye.  Or in your iris to be more specific.

Austin Carr of the Fast Company website reports that an american biometrics research firm, Global Rainmakers Inc., and the city of Leon, Mexico plan to implement the first city wide biometrics identification system, first for law enforcement and later followed by the release of commercial applications.

"In the future, whether it's entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris," says Jeff Carter, CDO of Global Rainmakers. Before coming to GRI, Carter headed a think tank partnership between Bank of America, Harvard, and MIT. "Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected [to the iris system] within the next 10 years," he says.

Like all new technology, adoption of this tech will start off slow.  Leon is just one city after all.  But notice the rate of exponential growth Mr. Carter suggests when he says that "every person, place and thing" will be connected to a central system within the next 10 years.

The eye scan technology, from the description provided by Mr. Carr of his experience at GRI's research facilities in New York, NY,  is going to revolutionize life as we know it.  It will be able to identify the passengers in vehicles as they travel down the highway.  It will be able to identify convicted shoplifters, thieves, robbers, even hot check writers, as they pass through a stores doorway.  Law enforcement officers will need only to have a person they have stopped look at a small hand held scanner to quickly know the identity of the person they have stopped.  The technology may even serve as the lock on your door.

The roll out of the Iris Scan system for the city of Leon is already underway according to Carr.

"GRI's scanning devices are currently shipping to the city, where integration will begin with law enforcement facilities, security check-points, police stations, and detention areas. This first phase will cost less than $5 million. Phase II, which will roll out in the next three years, will focus more on commercial enterprises. Scanners will be placed in mass transit, medical centers and banks, among other public and private locations.

The devices range from large-scale scanners like the Hbox (shown in the airport-security prototype above), which can snap up to 50 people per minute in motion, to smaller scanners like the EyeSwipe and EyeSwipe Mini, which can capture the irises of between 15 to 30 people per minute. "

I think it's going to be hard not to argue that we are headed, as Carr's frequent reference's to Orwell's novel 1984 implies, towards a world where the government, and anyone else with access to the Iris system data base, has the capacity to track each person through their everyday life using billions of sensors and scanners which are predicted to become ubiquitous in our public and private lives. Theoretically opting into the system will be voluntary, but the disincentives for choosing not to opt-in are large. As Carr notes, refusing to opt-in potentially makes it more likely to make you an object of suspicion or investigation.

"There's a lot of convenience to this--you'll have nothing to carry except your eyes," says Carter, claiming that consumers will no longer be carded at bars and liquor stores. And he has a warning for those thinking of opting out: "When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in."

I don't know about Iris, but I'm not all that comfortable with the thought of Big Brother moving in.

Shift Happens.

The challenge, created by the present exponential acceleration in technology, facing today's educators is enormous. This video, titled Did you know? Shift Happens 2.0 is four years old now. It is important to remember that some technologies and trends have doubled in speed, size or efficiency two or three times since this video was first made. Smart phones like the iPhone and the Android didn't exist.  Since then Facebook, which was hardly on the radar screen in 2006 has grown to over 500,000,000 users. Created by Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch for a group of 150 high school educators, it was intended to illustrate a future of technology moving into hyper drive, and the difficulties of preparing students for that 21st century world.



 Did you know? Shift Happens 2.0 is another of the videos highlighted in the Singularity Hub's list of 12 videos that will help you love the future.

Futuristic Short: Doll Face

Created by Andy Huang, Doll Face is thought provoking and a bit unsettling. The video was part of a list of 12 videos that will help you love the future put together at the Singularity Hub website.

When A Group Mind Goes Schizophrenic

The more I watch the Tea Party/Far Right drag the conservative movement in our Republic to the right, the more I have I have to wonder if the alternative universe many modern right wing conservatives describe when they describe the motivations and actions of the President and democrats, doesn't represent a sort of group mind schizophrenia.  The Mayo Clinic describes the positive symptoms of schizophrenia:

Delusions. These beliefs are not based in reality and usually involve misinterpretation of perception or experience. They are the most common of schizophrenic symptoms.

Hallucinations. These usually involve seeing or hearing things that don't exist, although hallucinations can be in any of the senses. Hearing voices is the most common hallucination among people with schizophrenia.

Thought disorder. Difficulty speaking and organizing thoughts may result in stopping speech midsentence or putting together meaningless words, sometimes known as "word salad."

Disorganized behavior. This may show in a number of ways, ranging from childlike silliness to unpredictable agitation.

 All of these symptoms, to one degree or another, would characterize what I perceive coming from right wing politicians and opinion managers like the former half term governor, Sarah Palin, Fox "News" personality, Glen Beck, Minnesota Congresswoman, Barbara Bachman, or Nevada Senate candidate, Sharon Angle.

Among the delusions the far right group mind embraces are:

The delusion and irrational fear that Barack Obama represents the interests of lazy blacks who want to raise taxes and steal white peoples America so they don't have to work.

The irrational fear that Obama and Democrats want to put white conservatives in concentration camps.

The irrational fear that Obama, the democrats, and even false Republicans, supports terrorists who want to destroy America.

The irrational delusion that Obama is not really an American.

The delusion that Obama and the democrats are engaged in nationalization of the Auto Industry, Wall Street and the Healthcare industry.

The delusional fear that Obama and democrats want to deny old people healthcare using death panels.

The irrational fear that Obama and democrats use public education to indoctrinate  and re-educate children to hate God and worship "big government" as God,

The irrational delusion that Obama and not Bush is the reason for the huge deficit we have today and that Obama, and not Bush, signed the Wall Street Bailout into law.

In short, the Tea Party/ Far Right, as a group, seems to see things that don't exist, embrace beliefs that are not based in reality, show unpredictable agitation over imagined conspiracies against them,  and engage in rambling "word salad" defenses of their delusional beliefs when pressed to explain them.  Is it time to come out and say it..., the conservative group mind is going schizophrenic, perceiving hostility and threat where none exist, finding reality increasingly confusing and retreating into a social isolation of it's own self reinforcing media messages?

A New Twist To Putting Your Thinking Cap On

The online edition of NewScientist reports that a PhD student researcher at the Centre for the Mind, at the University of Sidney, Richard Chi, has developed a non-invasive technique which seems to boost visual memory and perceptual skills of humans by an order of 110%.  By using electrodes placed near the left and right temples, Chi applies a weak current which temporarily depresses activity in the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and increases activity in the right ATL.  The resulting effect was a jump of 110% in the ability of test subjects compared to groups where the decrease/increase of activity in the ATL was reversed and where there was no stimulation of the ATL.  The NewScientist article explained:

The technique uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which weak electrical currents are applied to the scalp using electrodes. The method can temporarily increase or decrease activity in a specific brain region and has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills in volunteers.

...The left ATL is known to be crucial for context processing, among other things, while the right ATL is associated with visual memory. Chi's team suggests that inhibiting activity in the left ATL cuts errors in visual memory by reducing the potentially confusing influence that context can have on recognition. This effect, combined with an increase in activity in the right ATL, allows someone to be more aware of the literal details of each pattern. Further studies in which the temporal lobes are stimulated individually may help to distinguish the underlying mechanisms involved.

A previous experiment using the same visual task, but without tDCS, showed that people with autism outperformed non-autistic individuals by roughly the same margin as the improvement seen in this experiment, says Chi.

In future, Chi says, it might eventually be possible to use tDCS to "develop a 'thinking cap' that enhances learning".

One aspect of a future of accelerating technology will be how technology along with reverse engineering of the brain is used to leverage and enhance our brain's capabilities.  In an post on Beautiful Minds blog at PsychologyToday.com Scott Kaufman shares an interview with Allan Snyder, also of the Centre for the Mind about our ability to boost brain capacity and creativity in the near future.

S. Do you see any way your methods could enhance higher thinking processes?

Yes. For example, using non-invasive brain stimulation could aid in problem solving and decision making, by allowing someone to examine things from a variety of perspectives, without being so committed to previous interpretations. And we're examining its potential for enhancing creativity.

A. Is an artist 'cheating' if he induces his artistic skills each time he creates a work of art?

Interesting question. It's well documented that artists though the ages have used psychoactive drugs to facilitate creative production. You could view non-invasive brain stimulation as a much milder and safer alternative method of opening 'the doors of perception'. On the other hand, if brain stimulation was only available to a select few amongst many competing for a prize or similar, that might be an unfair situation. But, we tend to put less value today on photographic realism - these aren't the times of Constable

I'm very excited to think that this could well represent a first step in really accessing our brains memory capacity.  I'll be interested to see if  learning conducted under the effects of tDCS is effective for long term memory when a person isn't under those effects.  Snyder's hints at the social impact of the differences between those who benefit from access to brain stimulation vs those who don't have access deserves a great deal of thought.

A Return To The Stone Age?

File this under possible evidence that we are in a slow decline. Last July 17th, the Wall Street Journal reported on a trend among States and Local governments across the country to allow paved roads to return to gravel because they can't afford to maintain the pavement.

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as "poor man's pavement." Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

While the argument can be made in the case of some of the roads converted or allowed to erode back to gravel that the populations or the purposes they once served no longer exist, in other cases it is purely a matter of tax revenue being reduced through tax cuts until maintenance of roads is impossible.

"I'd rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill," said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman's Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood (ND).

...,A lot of these roads have just deteriorated to the point that they have no other choice than to turn them back to gravel," says Larry Galehouse, director of the National Center for Pavement Preservation at Michigan State University. Still, "we're leaving an awful legacy for future generations."

Some experts caution that gravel roads can be costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed. A gravel road "is not a free road," says Purdue University's John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled "Back to the Stone Age."

Is this decline an isolated trend in the overall picture of our society's and our nation's health? Is it emblematic of a slow erosion of infrastructure with potential impact on economic and societal cohesion? If so, what conditions contribute to the causes of this ongoing slow erosion of infrastructure? Or is it simply the re-alignment of resources based on changing needs of the nations rural states and counties?

Mind Reading On My Mind

One of the rss feeds I make sure I glance at daily, is the news feed from inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil's website KurzweilAI.net. That website does a good job of pulling together tech and science news related to the exponential acceleration of technology the human race is experiencing. He featured two news articles on advancements in mind reading which caught my attention in today's rss feed. I've touched on mind reading and advancements in brain scanning and modeling algorithms which are increasingly effective at reading the mind's memory content and predicting future intentions in an earlier post on The Common Green American. Today's two stories show the rapid advancement's which have taken place in the relatively few months that have passed since then.

The first article flagged by KurzweilAI.net comes from The Next Web.

okia claims the ThinkContacts app it’s developing for Nokia N900’s Maemo platform allows a “motor disabled person to make a phone call to a desired contact by himself/herself,” using brainwaves.

According to Nokia, a headset reads the user’s brainwaves, which are digitized and sent via Bluetooth to the phone, where the data is translated into the user’s “level of meditation” and “attention” for navigating between contacts and selecting one to call.

One of the main threads of the near future that I'm looking for will be the overnight adoption of various communication and information technologies which make use of brain scan technology as the interface. This looks like it's very close to being a precursor to just that sort of technology. Expect to see it coming soon to a teenager near you.

The second story of interest from the field of neuromarketing is a bit more insidious. The NewScientist magazine recruited the help of neuromarketing company, Neurofocus to access the subconscious mind in determining the most effective cover for this months edition.

The science behind this effort is based upon brain-imaging techniques like fMRI, which measures blood flow to determine activity in different regions of the brain and EEG which looks at different brain patterns. One of the determinations they made using this data, is something I learned in my years in autosales..., people are less rational and more emotional in their decision making than traditional economics has suggested.

In a typical test, NeuroFocus wires subjects up to a high-density array of electrodes, which gives coverage of their whole cerebral cortex. They also apply facial sensors to filter out electrical signals generated by muscle movements such as swallowing and blinking. Subjects are then exposed to the test material - TV adverts, movie trailers and so on - and their brain responses recorded. The main things NeuroFocus looks for in the EEG trace is attention, memory activation and emotional engagement. They also use eye-tracking to follow precisely where the subject is looking.

In addition, NeuroFocus looks for specific EEG patterns which the company believes betray whether or not a person will buy a product. In its early days, the company studied thousands of TV commercials looking for characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with successful and unsuccessful ads. It is these they are after. "It's not deterministic, but it gives a relative probability, given two adverts, which is more likely to change behaviour," says Michael Smith of NeuroFocus.

Finally, NeuroFocus does what it calls "deep response testing". This exploits a well-known EEG signal called P300, a spike of brain activity that occurs about 300 milliseconds after you see something new or personally meaningful. "That brain wave is interesting because it's bigger if the stimulus is very salient to you," says Smith. NeuroFocus uses this to find out if test materials have primed people's brains to certain concepts. If the P300 response to a word like "buy" is stronger just after seeing an advert, the researchers conclude that the advert is more likely to elicit a purchase.

Among the things that neuromarketers have learned over recent years is how the brains emotion-related limbic system impacts and overrides rational decision making as it relates to brand loyalty, and that we form long term emotional relationships with brands. This has led to all the feel good marketing meant to sustain those long term emotional ties of recent years.

Another key discovery of neuroeconomics is that certain products trigger activity in brain systems that usually fire in anticipation of rewarding stimuli such as food, sex and addictive drugs. A team at the University of Ulm in Germany found, for example, that pictures of sports cars produced much stronger activity in these reward centres than pictures of other cars, in research funded by DaimlerChrysler (Neuroreport, vol 13, p 2499).

Wanted: reward

Neuroeconomists now think of the amount of activity in these regions as a sort of universal currency of desirability, allowing the brain to weigh up different rewards. "There's a lot of evidence that signals in these regions represent some kind of value," says Berns, "and that makes a lot of sense. We're always trying to make decisions between doing things that have value but are completely different, like going to the movies, going out for dinner or spending time with loved ones."

Findings such as these have encouraged market researchers to believe that they can access the hidden desires and preferences locked away inside consumers' heads. The past few years has seen a steady stream of businesses turning to companies such as NeuroFocus. Want to know if a new car design is pushing the right buttons? See if it revs the reward centres in the brain. Is this advert going to make people love our product? Measure the emotional response it generates.

While the articles conclusions focus on the suggestion that the information derived from today's brain imaging and scanning is of limited use in creating marketing which "forces" people to buy, it think it ignores the reality that brain imaging technology is getting cheaper and better with every machine generation, (which right now is somewhere around 18-24 months) and that as this tech becomes ubiquitous, we may see a day when a company is discreetly scanning prospective customers to help it close a sale.

RSAnimate - The Secret Powers of Time

Philip Zimbardo's talk on differences in how we perceive time, both from cultural differences, and differences taking place in technology adoption and it's impact on the development of children.



Found via The Long Now Blog

Technologically driven social, political and cultural stratification in the coming decades

During the last election, we saw technology play a large role in political organizing. The campaign of Barack Obama effectively used newly created technology to communicate and organize political and financial support efficiently to out manuveure all of his competitors. All of this efficiency made possible by new internet technologies, which much of the older demographics which make up much of the republican base will never adopt. Organization of this demographic is limited to old media of radio and television. It lacks the ability to personalize information sent to supporters. It lacks the ability to put information in the hands of supporters at will with specific targeted messages.

One of the differences between John Kerry and Barack Obama campaigns, is that in 2004 Youtube and Facebook did not exist. Two technologies that Obama used effectively in his campaign to communicate with and organize supporters just four years later. What's more, it continues to communicate by text, email, twitter and facebook to millions of supporters about what they are doing, what they hope to do, and what supporters can do to help.


As technology accelerates, how will the early adoption of new communication and information technologies which can be leveraged for greater efficiencies of organization by younger generations influence the politics of the coming decades? What will those game changing technologies look like? Will they be the remote technologies which the young will adopt to stay connected to their friends, accessing live remote broadcast by their friends, and keeping constant awareness of the location and activities of friends and family which are rapidly developing today? Perhaps it will be the adoption of man-computer interfaces and direct interfaces with the brain which provide a total state of connection expected in the next decade?

The impact of inter-generational differences in the adoption of new communication, information and bio technologies is going to be hard to predict. I speculate that even the adoption of new technology will become a political issue, with the potential to precipitate a new generation of 21st century Amish, who fore swear both coming technologies as well as political involvement on religous grounds, as even the definition of what it means to be human is brought into question by the rapid explosion of technology. It's also possible that rapid technological growth will lead to a backlash of popular political neo-ludditism and anti-technologism from the right and the left.

Whatever the outcome, uncertain future, here we come.

So you say you want a Bio-Revolution?

Juan Enriquez Explains The Biology Revolution At TED 2009 from Keith Kleiner on Vimeo.

Hat tip to the blog Singularity Hub.

In 9 minutes Juan eloquently describes how major disruptive advances are coming to human civilization much faster than people realize.

Off the shelf biological components are being created that allow people to build organisms as if they were building a car or a machine.

Tissues and organs that will someday replace our old ones are being grown in the lab.

Man-made mechanical ears and eyes are on a path to not only match the capabilities of their natural counterparts, but shortly thereafter to exceed them.

We will see more and more news about revolutionary new bio-medical technology. In many way's it's exciting to think about being able to grow new teeth or new knees and cartilage. But there is also the danger of misuse. The possibility that accelerating bio-medical technology will turn out to be like an evil genie, which once unleashed, will never be captured again and put back into it's bottle.

Conservative mindset may pose dangers to our survival

In an age of rapid and disruptive technological and scientific advancement, can the United States, as well as humanity, afford the impulses of conservatives to block legislative and cultural change? My thoughts are this..,dealing with the accelerating, disruptive advancement and change, coupled with ongoing environmental challenges and accelerating consumption of non-renewable resources, will require flexibility and adaptability, along with a willingness to pursue and accept scientific evidence and solutions, even when contrary to long held beliefs. It will require an ability to imagine and anticipate the oncoming future.

These are not things that people with conservative mind sets naturally do well. The natural inclination of a conservative personality is to resist change. Change in these basic attitudes or core realities of people with a conservative mind set is highly unlikely. I believe that the ongoing disruptive technological change will leave conservatives bewildered and increasingly frustrated, as our society starts to really reach levels of accelerated social and cultural fragmentation accompanied and generated by disruptive advancement in many fields of science, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and computer intelligence.

As a society, and as individuals, we have to recognize that with rapid technological and scientific change, will come needed adjustments to our socieities legislative and regulatory schemes, as well as re-alignment and restructuring of basic institutions and infrastructures. As conservatives are showing today, their strong impulses to try to stop change by obstructing new legislation can be very successful in derailing and causing great skepticism in legislative efforts, that frankly our lives and the continued success of our society will depend on. The battle to reshape our healthcare system is a good example. Even though we have the least effective system in term of coverage and healthcare outcomes (a higher percentage of americans die of preventable disease) of any industrialized nations, conservatives react with fear at any suggestion of any change, even though they may agree that the old way of doing things just isn't working and that the accelerating price of healthcare is unsustainable.

A person can only speculate as to the consequences of the coming freak out by a significant segment of our population when people start to implant computerized devices in their heads and bodies or key pieces of critical infrastructure are controlled and operated by artificial intelligences. We may see a model of that coming freak out in the recent appearance of the Tea Party movement. The core realities of many conservative movement members seem to reflect a high level of viscerally perceived threat, with many of the group responding with violent language, along with public displays of weaponry, such as we saw from some members immediately after Obama's election. If you also consider the sudden and rapid rise of militia movements in response to both Clinton and Obama, I think you see evidence of a violent potential reaction in some conservative demographics to the rapid technological, biological and social changes of our near future. With the reported fragility of many of our societies centralized infrastructure hierarchies, I wonder how long it is before the U.S. and the rest of the world starts to experience the saboteur caused infrastructure failures, such as those created by the hackers who have been causing ongoing power failures in Brazil over the past year. Or perhaps militia backed attacks like the OKC bombing aimed at installations necessary to those critical infrastructures in an attempt to stop the progress of technological change.

This speculation on adverse reactions and influences of the conservative mindset on our societies ability to effectively adapt to the rapid change of our near future is not to suggest that there aren't other demographic mind sets in our society which also carry potential negative influences on our future, than just those with conservative impulses. But it's important to recognize that the "Luddite" response to technological change is a very human response and one which has been with us for a long time. The question is, will it serve us well, or help bring down our house of cards?

Mysterious Bots run amok on Wall Street

Have we reached a point when it's prudent to ask, just how much control over our lives we should be giving to artificial intelligences. Is it possible to say that we've already passed the point where machine intelligence is in the drivers seat? According to an article in the Atlantic magazine, a software engineer for the market trading data firm Nanex, Jeffrey Donavon, may have found evidence of the ghost in the machine, or he may have found evidence of a troubling trend in "algorithmic terrorism" used by institutions or individuals unknown. The unknown trading bots, are simply trading programs based on mathematical algorithms, little bits of artificial intelligence, which in most instances is programed to look for patterns in the market and make lightning quick trades to take advantage of those patterns, the goal of course being to make money. In this case, the mysterious bots identified by Donavon don't seem to be attempting to make trades, but to simply create confusing data, or noise, in the computerized trading systems.

These odd bots don't really make sense within the normal parameters of the high-frequency trading business. High-frequency traders do employ algorithms to look for patterns in the market and exploit them, but their goal is making winning trades, not simply sending quotes into the financial ether.

...,The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren't doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there's no way they'd ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

In fact, it's hard to figure out exactly what they're up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we're witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it's really bizarre.

Nanex found the odd patterns while looking for evidence of what caused the flash crash on May 6th of this year, where the market dropped over a thousand points in just a few minutes. On July 16th, another potentially dangerous situation was set up by one of these mysterious bot driven trade orders, where in orders placed before the market opened, 84,000 trades on 300 stocks were made in just 20 seconds.

This all happened pre-market when volume is low, but if this kind of burst had come in at a time when we were getting hit hardest, I guarantee it would have caused delays in the [central quotation system]," Donovan said. That, in turn, could have become one of those dominoes that always seem to present themselves whenever there is a catastrophic failure of a complex system.

...,"Algorithms that might be spoofing the market are something that should be made illegal," said John Bates, a former Cambridge professor and the CTO of Progress Software. But he didn't want this presumably negative practice to color the more mundane competitive practices of high-frequency traders.

"There is algorithmic terrorism and then there is reverse engineering, which is probably just part of good business practice," Bates said.

The day when all of our society's critical systems will be completely controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms which move at speeds and with motives and objectives we can scarcely comprehend fast approaches. I wonder if we will notice. Is it already here?