Voices in AI - and life-extension

 On the crucial and ever-more pertinent topic of AI or Artificial Intelligence, have a look at this Top 10 list: people in AI that you should know.  I’ll copy the list in detail, below. But even the most casual of you will recognize two of the names.

== Drones in the wrong hands ==

After giving talks in DC to several packed halls filled with agency civil servants about “threat and danger horizons,” I encountered this Russian video showing a machine-gun armed quad-copter in action. How long before one of these is used to assassinate somebody?  First use will likely lead to the banning, then tight regulation of drones in the US. 

The irony?  We’ll likely be safer in a world of many drones in private hands. Because civilians who see bad actor drones will likely dive their own drones into them. (I referred to this in EXISTENCE.) We need to remember, when it comes to dual use technologies that our safety depends only partly on restrictions - or on a vigilant protector caste (PC).  Over the long run, what will make the crucial difference is a high ratio of good practitioners to bad tech users. 

Keeping that ratio high-and-rising is going to be as important as any investment in the Protector Caste. They complement each other.

== Peak oil… by outgrowing it? ==

Speaking of whales, here’s a quote from energy expert Amory Lovins about how quickly an industry can change:  "In the 1850s, whalers—America’s fifth-largest industry—were astounded to run out of customers before they ran out of whales," he writes.

Among the factors that Lovins weighs: “the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons remains an order of magnitude better than that of the best batteries envisioned today, though electric cars use that energy far more efficiently.”

== People Most Watched by the AI Elite ==

Back to our lead-in story. These are the ten folks who the most selective experts in Artificial Intelligence pay attention to -- that is, according to the network tracking service Little Bird.

1. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla; co-founder of Open AI, a new organization dedicated to making sure AI is beneficial to humanity. Elon is the person most followed by the AI thought leaders. 

2. Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.  

3. Gary Marcus, CEO of Geometric Intelligence, Professor of Psychology & Neural Science, at NYU.

4. Ben Goertzel, founder of OpenCog, is a prolific advocate for an open source artificial intelligence network.

5. David Brin futurist, blogger, and author with a new book coming out in March called Insistence of Vision, which he says "will open doorways into possible (and mind-blowing) tomorrows and alternate realities.”

6. Randy Olson, data scientist researching AI, master curator of great content related to AI, data visualization and more.  

7. Peter Xing, intrapreneur at Deloitte and co-founder of TranshumanismAU, an Australian organization that aims to enhance the human biological condition.

8. Nikola Danaylov is a Singularity-minded public intellectual and host of the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast. 

9. Rodney Brooks, CTO of Rethink Robotics, a company that makes robots that collaborate with humans.

10. Rod Furlan, a Singularity University alum who’s the founder of Lucidscape, a company "building a new kind of massively-distributed 3D simulation engine to power the vast network of interconnected virtual worlds.”

“Follow these people,” Sayeth the Little Bird site, “or ignore them, at your own peril.”

== Paints Preserve Us! ==

The Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) has awarded a prize to a team that used polymers to stabilize all the cell’s in a mouse brain so it could be cryo frozen without (much) damage.  This will supposedly preserve the location and strength of every neural synapse or the “connectome” which some believe will be enough to allow accurate modeling of all of a suspended person’s thoughts and memories.  Note that the goal is no longer to make the organic brain come alive again, itself. I still deem this approach problematic though.

1) There is evidence that the synapse is not everything. There are signs of substantial intra-cellular computing.

2) The need for freezing at cryo temperatures still leaves the stored brains very vulnerable across a century or more. The "preservation" thing will only become credible when you can put grandpa's fully plasticized head on the mantle - at room temperature. (See this depicted in my just-published collection of stories, Insistence of Vision.)

== Inheritance just got weirder and more like the New Testament ==

Epigenetics is revealing how experiences endured by a child can sometimes affect his/her sperm and /or ova in ways that then are inherited in a somewhat 'Lamarkian' fashion, by the kids of those kids or even grandkids. Changes in regulatory chemistry, rather than the basic DNA code, itself. 

In this study we see a small, isolated Norwegian region that had cycles of starvation and excess that are very well documented.  It appears to be the latter - years when good harvests led to records of "gluttonous" over eating - that apparently had the most severe effects on lifespans, two generations later!  

Studying the massive regulatory stew of the human epigenome will dwarf the Human Genome Project: "…the human genome contains something like 25,000 genes; it took $3 billion to map them all. The human epigenome contains an as yet unknowable number of patterns of epigenetic marks ... certainly in the millions. A full epigenome map will require major advances in computing power. When completed, the Human Epigenome Project (already under way in Europe) will make the Human Genome Project look like homework that 15th century kids did with an abacus."

Almost yearly, scientists announce one more intervention that “increases the lifespan of mice by 25%” or more.  Caloric restriction, various nutrients, blood exchanges with younger animals… and now by killing off “senescent cells” that have stopped all active division processes.  Eliminate those cells and the mouse not only lives longer but appears younger… (much the way Larry Niven portrayed something similar, in RINGWORLD.)  Scientists discovered that senescent cells secrete a tumor-suppressing protein – hence they rewrote part of the mouse’s genetic code to produce the protein caspase when they begin secreting p16—this acts as a kill-switch, which prompts that cell to die.  Clever. 

But also simple, and hence it qualifies as “low hanging fruit.” Any species that desperately needs to switch to a longer lifespan – as we did, half a million or so years ago – is likely to stumble onto this method and hence I’ll bet they’ll find we already do something like this.  See my essay on why we’ll have to find some more difficult and un-natural things, to get real lifespan extension for us already long lived humans. 

 == Science & Tech news ==

Finally, a truly non-volatile memory storage system, laser etching inside disks of pure quartz - could have an indefinitely long lifespan. 

Meanwhile. A Harvard team have devised a way to make virtually any shape out of a flat sheet of paper, using a fundamental origami or tessellation fold.

Google's Project Loon has been doing R&D on a fleet of interconnected, autonomous, cheap balloons that will soon fly high above commercial jets providing ultra cheap internet access all over the world. This is just one of several endeavors that promise an important open door to the world and cosmos for billions. 

The EHang184 quadcopter isn’t exactly your flying car. But it’s a step closer. One-person passenger hauling by an autonomous drone. 

A nice interview with my friend Vint Cerf.

Alex Steffen, late of Worldbuilding.org, has a new kickstarted project: Our Heroic Future - that I have supported, launching the live-performance talk trend some way beyond the TED standard of a mere inspiring 18 minutes. He intends "a remarkable three-part live documentary. Each 90-minute show is centered around a talk, incorporating stage presentation, film and photography, visual design and motion graphics, sound, music and lighting to tell a powerful story of where we are, where we can go, and what it could be like when we get there."  Give it a look. Sure it's similar to things I've been doing. But there's a huge need for future-can-do tent meetings!  Revivals of our most important faith... belief in ourselves and our children.

Google wants to work with university researchers on short-term projects involving the use of its software and technologies in emerging Internet of things applications.

As every other part of optics shrank, the focusing lens – and the necessary space behind it – remained bulky and heavy, especially on space probes and our portable devices. Now comes a flat, lensless array of several million pinholes, giving new impetus behind the oldest principle in optics, opening an amazing diversity of possibilities.

Humans and Neanderthals may have interbred 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.  There may have been a small admixture exodus of African humans long before the main wave emerged. Here’s a better article. 

and about space...

Located about 300 million light-years away in the Coma Cluster, a record-breaking supermassive black hole weighs in at twenty-one billion times the mass of the Sun, several thousand times larger than the mammoth that lurks at the core of our own galaxy.  Long ago, it would have been a quasar. The accretion disc around the black hole would have emitted up to a thousand times the energy output of the Milky Way.

Mapping  asteroids is important to our future - or discovering threats to it. The B612 Foundation plays an important role in this effort. As it progresses, the distribution of discovered objects appears to be pretty much as expected, except in one zone. Close to the Sun. 

== The incredible forgiveness of our fellow creatures ==

I’ve long been fascinated by the ability and willingness of higher animals to parse among and between humans. Of course we know dogs and cats and horses do this, on a personal level. But then there are the whales and dolphins and sea lions who will flee some ships on sight, but approach others either to play or (alas, often) to beg help with a problem, e.g. cutting them free of a tangled fishing net. 

Elephants are special in almost every way. They know that some humans are waging terrible war upon them, poachers slaying them out of greed for ivory.  Yet, they have been known to flee in the direction of game wardens. And last year, in apparent proof of advanced linguistic and memory abilities, a bull who had never been to an animal rescue center led a wounded comrade there, somehow (presumably) having learned of it second-hand.

Now see this video about a matriarchal herd that annually migrates, utterly peacefully, through the lobbyof a tourist hotel, to munch on fruits in the yard beyond. It is elevating – even uplifting – to realize that we are not hated, as a species.  Animals seem to know that we are varied.  And at our best, we are capable of being friends. 

(In EARTH see the self-contained story of a brave young man’s confrontation with a merchant of animal death.  And in INSISTENCE OF VISION, several tales featuring “Elepents” – redesigned as the perfect workers in space.)

== And finally ==

Share  20 Jokes That Only Intellectuals Will Understand. Some are pretty good!