Is the Singularity Near? It All Depends Upon Which Singularity You are Talking About

If you are counting on being bailed out of the "human stupidity quagmire" by a super-intelligent machine, you may have to wait a very long time. A recent New York Times Guest Column looks at the difference between brains and computers, suggesting a reason or two why Ray Kurzweil's time projections to the "singularity" may be wildly wrong.

engineers could learn a thing or two from brain strategies. For example, even the most advanced computers have difficulty telling a dog from a cat, something that can be done at a glance by a toddler — or a cat. We use emotions, the brain’s steersman, to assign value to our experiences and to future possibilities, often allowing us to evaluate potential outcomes efficiently and rapidly when information is uncertain. In general, we bring an extraordinary amount of background information to bear on seemingly simple tasks, allowing us to make inferences that are difficult for machines. _NYT

There is also the problem of power consumption. Since computer power consumption rises explosively with processing speed, a Kurzweilian 2025 "human-equivalent computer" would require a gigawatt of power to function. Imagine if every human being required the dedicated power output of a full-sized nuclear fission reactor, just to function normally!

A very different singularity -- the biosingularity -- is being approached at breakneck acceleration by bioresearchers. For example, researchers can now observe individual cells' responses to various stimuli in real time, using optical microscopy. An immense amount of data will be generated from observation of a mere cell. So don't throw away those computers. We will need them to store, correlate, and make sense of the immense quantity of data being generated.

Here are some more dam-busters:

Mitochondria play a much larger role in normal life processes than we thought.

Near real-time PCR .

Monitoring the epigenetic status of all body tissues .

Better ways to gauge gene expression .

....And many more 2nd order and higher improvements in bio-research.

But don't give up on your dreams of human-equivalent and better machine intelligence. It will happen. First we will need to better understand the "proof of concept" of intelligent machines -- our brains. Researchers working separately at Hebrew University and at Karolinska Institute, are taking different, yet promising approaches to brain modeling and simulation, hoping for breakthroughs in understanding that might lead to bigger breakthroughs, and so on ...

The Biosingularity may just hit us a decade or two before the AI Singularity. That might give us enough time to prepare -- to augment ourselves well enough to survive the emergence of intelligent machines. If we are ready for them when they come, we are more likely to arrive at an amiable understanding with each other.

The Limitations on Engineered Biological Systems

I was recently made aware of a stimulating article at Acceleration Watch dealing with the "Limits of Engineered Biological Systems." Written by John Smart, the essay lays out reasons why it will be extremely difficult--if not impossible in practice--to genetically bioengineer the human body for long life and superintelligence.

Specifically, the "path dependency" of the development of the human bio-organism--the complexity of interacting gene systems--makes it almost impossible to make significant changes in the genome that will be more beneficial than detrimental. All of the "legacy code" of the human genome is extremely resistant to intentional tampering, and makes it far more likely that any given intervention will be harmful rather than helpful in achieving a biological singularity.

I encourage everyone with an interest in the biosingularity, and the genetic augmentation of human intelligence and lifespan, to read John Smart's well-reasoned essay.

In the coming weeks and months, I will be dealing with the issues in more detail. I am in full agreement with the basic outline and most of the main points of Smart's argument. It is likely that essentially immortal machines will acquire many of the strengths of human cognition, and human mobility, before mobile and mortal humans gain long life (200+ year lifespans) and superintelligence.

It is likely that cyborg augments with neural and vascular interfaces will extend human functionality and lifespan before humans gain the mastery of their own highly complex genomes.

But I feel that there are some loopholes in the legacy code. Recent discoveries of epigenetic mechanisms including "non-coding RNA's" and other means of influencing "families" of gene expression from "the outside", suggests that it is not necessary to change the actual genome to any great extent in order to achieve significant improvements in targeted human functions.

All futurists who write about the genetic improvement of human existence, including myself, need to take into account John Smart's clear and cogent cautions on the dangers of trying to change the human genetic design.

Kurzweil Predicts Human Immortality

At the recent SCO6 supercomputing conference, Ray Kurzweil predicted human immortality by way of nanomedicine, and more. "Nanobots" in our bloodstreams will repair cellular and tissue damage as fast as it occurs. Affordable computers will be a thousand times more powerful than a human brain . . . Kurzweil clearly believes in "singularity now!"

According to Kurzweil, here's what we can expect in the not-so-distant future:

—Doctors will be doing a backup of our memories by the late 2030s;

—By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots, or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our brains to keep us young;

—In 15 years, human longevity will be greatly extended. By the 2020s, we'll be adding a year of longevity or more for every year that passes;

—In the same timeframe, we'll routinely be in virtual reality environments. Instead of making a cell call, we could "meet" someone in a virtual world and take a walk on a virtual beach and chat. Business meetings and conference calls will be held in calming or inspiring virtual locations;

—When you're walking down the street and see someone you've met before, background information about that person will pop up on your glasses or in the periphery of your vision;

—Instead of spending hours in front of a desktop machine, computers will be more ingrained in our environment. For instance, computer monitors could be replaced by projections onto our retinas or on a virtual screen hovering in the air;

—Scientists will be able to rejuvenate all of someone's body tissues and organs by transforming their skin cells into youthful versions of other cell types;

—Need a little boost? Kurzweil says scientists will be able to regrow our own cells, tissues, and even whole organs, and then introduce them into our bodies, all without surgery. As part of what he calls the "emerging field of rejuvenation medicine," new tissue and organs will be built out of cells that have been made younger;

—Got heart trouble? No problem, says Kurzweil. "We'll be able to create new heart cells from your skin cells and introduce them into your system through the bloodstream. Over time, your heart cells get replaced with these new cells, and the result is a rejuvenated, young heart with your own DNA";

Source.

Kurzweil as author, is an example of an uber-synthesist. He sifts through mountains of information to find technology trends. He predicts the future, without bothering to have tongue in cheek.

His biological predictions may even be timid, but Kurzweil's predictions of nanotech healers and machine super-cognition may be more than a little optimistic--from his point of view.

Humans are certainly not ready for super-intelligence, and computers have no point of reference. Human intelligence is based on emotions, which are based on biological survival drives. Computers have nothing similar to build on, other than (anthropomorphizing alert!) an unconscious "need" for electricity, more memory, and faster processors. As soon as computers begin to understand the need for speed and power, we may all be in trouble. Computers are not bound by billions of years of kludgy evolution--they can evolve exponentially.

So it comes down to: how soon can engineers/scientists build emotions and drives into computers--computers with actuators and power to act in the physical world? Because that is when Kurzweilian things start happening. Only computers can program massively parallel computers. They simply need a good reason to do so.

Kurzweil uncharacteristically provides a caveat: terrorists may learn to use this advanced technology. But more realistically, modern terrorists would like nothing more than to take human societies back to the stone age, where merely talking about Kurzweil's predictions would get your head chopped off.

Cross-posted at Al Fin Longevity.

Waiting to Make SENS of Aging, Life Extension, Longevity?

Many of you are familiar with Aubrey de Grey and his SENS approach to life extension and longevity. For the intermediate term, de Grey's approach offers a lot of promise in the fight against aging.

In the short term, we need something more immediate. Ray Kurzweil has written a book on aging, discussing the several dozen supplements he takes daily. Most people do not need that much, but some might need more. A recent Barron's article took a stab at the subject, and the last Technology Review featured an interesting article about research into the anti-aging gene sirt.

This brief posting will deal with the basics of life extension now, rather than longevity in the next fifty years. Several postings in Al Fin have dealt with this topic, and there is no need to repeat them. This is just the basics. People below the age of 40 should ignore the hormone section. Each person should selectively choose agents based upon his own circumstances. Inform yourself in basic biology. Consult professionals before taking prescription medicines or extremely high doses of any agent. Middle aged males with or without family history of prostate cancer: take androgens, DHEA, etc. at your own risk, or after consulting a professional.

1. Hormones: DHEA, Pregnenolone, HGH, androgens, estrogens, thymosin, melatonin, and thyroid.
2. Antioxidants: Vitamins A,C,E, Lipoic Acid, Selenium, NAC, CoQ10, polyphenols, other phyto-antioxidants.
3. Antiglycation agents: Aminoguanidine, Carnosine, pyridoxamine, benfotiamine, ALT 711.
4. Brain Boosters: Ginkgo, PS, bacopa, DMAE, neurotransmitter precursors, hydergine, vinpocetine, Huperzine, etc.
5. Calorie restriction mimetics such as resveratrol, quercetin, etc.
6. General: TMG, Curcumin, carnitine, B complex, etc.
5. Immune Boosters: Wide variety of herbals and complex carbohydrate derivatives of plants and microorganisms, plus a lot of laughter.
6. Physical exercise and prudent eating, plus elimination of clearly bad habits and institution of good lifestyle habits.
7. Mental and emotional training. Practise sentic cycles and other forms of meditation. Read books on mind and memory training, and practise exercises.

If you are too old to wait for SENS, but rebel against the need to practise self-discipline, simply get old as you are doing. Otherwise, consult the longevity links posted on the side-bar of the Al Fin main page. Learn what you can, and start practising what you can. The important thing is to take a systematic approach. If you take supplements, but smoke like a stack, drink like a fish, exercise less than a minute a week, and sleep only two or three hours a night, you may not be taking a balanced approach to the problem.

In a later post, I will go into more detail on some of the particular agents and approaches outlined above. In the meantime, feel free to utilise the source materials that are provided under "longevity" and "singularity".

Regenerating Tissue: Two Approaches

Snowcrash has an excellent posting on stem cells and how stem cells are turned into tissues. This is an incredibly important field of research which is a critical part of the SENS approach to rejuvenative therapies. Go check out the article, the good link, and the great graphic.

Singularity News points to an interesting article from Wired News dealing with regenerative therapies that do not rely upon stem cells.
When a worm is chopped in two, the missing part often re-grows. Researchers at several biotech companies are challenging the assumption that humans can't perform a similar feat by developing drugs that encourage self-regeneration.

Hydra Biosciences is working a regeneration drug that stimulates heart muscle-cell regrowth, and could lead to better recoveries for heart attack sufferers. The protein-based drug induces mature cells to become a little bit like stem cells.

It causes heart cells to "dedifferentiate" partially, reverting them to an earlier stage of development and activating their ability to generate more muscle cells. Stem cells, by contrast, are fully undifferentiated, meaning they're a clean slate and have the ability to turn into any type of tissue. But replacing damaged or diseased tissue by regenerating a patient's own tissue, advocates say, has a leg up on stem cell-based procedures because it eliminates many potential medical problems, like immune rejection.

"Stem cell therapy involves using cells from outside the body, so there's the potential for incompatibility," says Mark Keating, head of the human genetics division at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research and an advisor to Hydra. "The cells can also divide too fast and become cancerous." He cautions, however, that it is too early to tell which of the two types of procedures will work best when tested in humans.


Of course autologous stem cells taken from the person himself are perfectly compatible, but those are generally adult stem cells (unless frozen stem cells from cord blood or embryonic clones are available). In general, what Mark Keating says is true.

The de-differentiation of mature cells is an interesting approach to creating quasi stem cells. Some of you may have read The Body Electric by Robert Becker. He is an orthopedist who pioneered the use of electromagnetic stimulation for healing difficult to heal bone fractures, and also pioneered the use of silver electrodes for healing chronic osteomyelitis infections that did not seem to heal with any other treatment. Anyway, Becker postulated that his electric stimulation was actually de-differentiating cells (either wbcs or fibrocytes) to form immature cells that then differentiated to osteoblasts, which then formed new bone to heal the fracture.

I doubt that is what actually happened, rather he was probably stimulating adult stem cells to become osteoblasts/osteocytes, but the concept of de-differentiation has always intrigued me, even after stem cell therapies became more practical.

Cancer is a form of de-differentiation that goes wildly out of control. Any modern therapies designed to regrow body parts will have to be carefully designed to avoid increased incidence of malignancies.

The Next Level vs. The Singularity

When referring to the progress of humans, I typically refer to the impending higher stage of mental and physical development of humans as "the next level." The term, "the singularity," is reserved for a technological evolution of increasing machine sophistication (including nanotech) and increasing sophistication of information technologies. The singularity can occur without significant change in human nature, simply because science and technology development does not require very many people, in relative numbers. The people involved in advancing science and technology are special individuals, in terms of mental capacity, but they are a tiny minority of all persons. The singularity is a technological and scientific event.

The next level is a human event, the transformation of humans. At the present time, what I call "between-levels humans" are simply too short-lived and too stupid to take care of this part of the universe. Look at the pollution, the religious wars, the third world deforestation, the primitive and wasteful energy technologies. Look at the insane politics, the oppression, the dictators starving their people. Look at the drug abuse, the general escapism, the strong drive to retire without ever achieving anything.

Technological and scientific advances can occur at a dazzling rate, and not change basic humanity. There will be more sophisticated means of escape, virtual reality being one such grail to be sought. Machine intelligence is looked on by many as either a benign form of slavery, or as an act of creating another intelligent species with which to commune. The more likely result of machine intelligence is a dizzying escalation of non-human intelligence, engineered by non-humans, for the benefit of non-humans.

That is, unless humans become more intelligent themselves, intelligent enough to understand and anticipate their creations, before they are created. The laws of complexity suggest that emergent phenomena can always surprise a designer. Simple starting rules give birth to complex resultant phenomena. Being aware of that, next level humans will conduct their experiments in contained environments, in some cases environments surrounded by the vacuum of space.

Humans must become more intelligent, and longer lived. There has always been a shortage of wise, intelligent, experienced humans. Look at contemporary society in the western world, where the vanity and rashness of youth are valued over the wisdom and perspective of maturity. Passion and excitement are valued, which is good, but they are valued above many other things that are more integral to a satisfying life.

We must not allow ourselves to lag too far behind our technology. Evolution by natural selection is a slow worker, requiring millenia and millions of years to accomplish great things. Evolution has done its work on each of us, for good or ill. But now we are not content to wait. Diabetics take genetically engineered insulin, in order to live and function. Critically ill patients in emergency wards and ICUs are given genetically engineered potions to allow them to survive the crisis and heal. Victims of malignant tumors are given genetically engineered drugs to combat their malignancies, and other genetically engineered drugs to help their bodies rebuild.

We drink milk produced by cows given genetically engineered BGH. We consume breads and pastas made from genetically engineered grains. We are encouraged by the improvement of health in third world countries, where genetically engineered "golden rice" prevents illness and death of children.

Genetic engineering, and soon stem cells and tissue engineering, are becoming a natural part of daily human existence. Most people shy away from the gene engineering of the human genome, but that too is becoming more common. Innocent children, through no fault of their own, are born with fatal genetic illnesses. In the opulent western world, we are generally happy to do whatever we can to provide these unfortunates with any advantage possible, including genetic therapies.

On the singularity side, cyborg technologies are becoming extremely common. Cochlear implants prepare the way for retinal implants. High technology titanium prosthetics make way to pressure sensing and active responding prosthetics. We are becoming more comfortable with the idea of prosthetic technologies to assist in compensating for any deficits. Mental prosthetics are very near, in fact in many ways personal computers and communications networks are forms of mental prosthesis, taking over from the printed page and spoken word.

What I am referring to with this discussion, is the difference between a consciousness that is biologically enhanced, and a consciousness that is technologically enhanced. Yes, I realize that technology is involved in any "artificial" enhancements. The distinction is useful, nonetheless. Next levels put humans first, singularitarians put technology first, whether intentionally or not.

A later discussion will take up "the technology reflex."

New Way to Deliver Cell Therapies

Yet another way to deliver therapies to cells has been developed by Johns Hopkins scientist David Gracias and colleagues.

A self-assembling gold-plated cube with perforations, the whole assembly as small as a dust mote, has been developed to time-deliver medications and other therapies directly to targeted tissues.

I am particularly interested in various ways of introducing medicines, hormones, and genes into cells. For those of you similarly interested, I strongly recommend the biosingularity blog linked in the blogroll to the right.

This blog's purpose is to explore ways that people can prepare for and transition to "the next level." Over time I will continue to sketch out the idea of the next level, and why it is subtly different from most concepts of the singularity. Regardless, in order to approach the next level, much better methods of gene therapy will be necessary than are presently available. There are enough reasons for developing gene therapy anyway, with devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, sickle cell disease, Huntington's disease, progeria, and many others, cutting the lives of young and relatively young people short.

It is necessary to look beyond the ability to treat selected diseases, to the broader abilities that will be provided by gene therapies. As the new year evolves, I will spend more time analysing the deeper meanings of this proliferation of discovery.