Embracing Chaos

I'm at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco today.  It's wonderful seeing my company doing great things for the world.  Enabling people to build universally accessible applications that help people solve difficult problems together.  It gets us closer to the ultimate solution.

I'm also giving an Ignite talk.  I wanted to make it something of a motivational speech.  Encourage people to think about their own roles in helping bring about the robot revolution.  I also wanted an excuse to share some of my thoughts on how to build an alarm bed.  I'll post my slides after the conference, or at least link to somebody else who does.  But for now, I've got the credits and content licensing posted.

I just got a new MacBook Pro of my very own which is undoubtedly the fastest computer I’ve ever owned.  I hear a lot of people saying things like "I don’t think I’ll ever get another desktop computer again."  But to me there is one very good reason to own and use a desktop computer: Desktop computers can provide greater bandwidth connections between your brain and the net than laptop computers can.   I’ll explain what this means.

We’re quickly approaching a world where we’re always connected to the net in some manner or another.  As we all know, the bandwidth with which we can communicate with the net varies tremendously between locations and situations.  It might be
as slow as AT&T’s EDGE network, or as fast as a dedicated office
line with many Gbps of throughput.  But when we’re in the office, the speed of our pipe to the net isn’t the limiting factor.  Usually it’s the servers on the other end which limit how fast we can get things done.  Even when I’m on my DSL line at home, Gmail is so slow that my pipe isn’t the limiting factor.  Effective bandwidth is limited by the smallest pipe in the series from your brain to the information service.

Sometimes the smallest pipe isn’t a network layer at all.  If you’re using your iPhone on the office’s WiFi network, the network will all run super fast.  But your effective speed will be the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and there are many small devices which are way harder to use than the iPhone.  There are multiple places the communications pipeline can get clogged:

1. The physical Human-Computer Interface of your device
2. The UI of the software on the device
3. The local processing power of your device
4. The direct connection from your device to the series of high-speed routers and fiber known as "the net"
5. The processing power of the servers running the information service you’re using

Laptops have totally caught up with desktops in terms of #2 and #3, but not #1.  The reason to use a desktop machine is that you can trick out its Human-Computer Interface to be super high bandwidth.  You can get yourself a really nice ergonomic keyboard, multiple high-resolution monitors, and a real mouse.  A friend of mine even built himself a foot-mouse.  Pretty soon your desktop will start to look like Lain’s Navi.  (Pictured above for those not familiar with it — go watch it.  It’s rad.)

You can do some of this with a laptop docking station if
available, or by manually plugging and unplugging things.  Many laptops
support 2 monitors, but generally one of them needs to be the internal
monitor, which won’t match the second one.  A USB port multiplier can
handle all your input devices which is nice.  So if you’re happy with
just two displays, a laptop can probably get enough HCI bandwidth today.

Looking further down the line, someday Apple will extend the iPhone’s multi-touch UI to iMacs and give us the Minority Report interface.  This will offer far more Human-Computer bandwidth than we’ve ever seen before.  This trend will continue towards direct Computer-Brain Interfaces at which point the line between our biological brains and our "exocortex" will get very blurry indeed.  I can hardly wait.

There’s been a lot of fuss lately about Nick Bostrom’s ideas that we live in a simulation as a result of an article in the New York Times.  Here I’ll provide some analysis of Bostrom’s bold claim, including a proposed mechanism to explain my grandfather’s assertion that mathematical simplicity and beauty were indicators of underlying truth.  I’ll also explore the implications of this possibility to our daily lives, and show why this is another reason to follow Transhuman Morality.

Simplified Simulation or Complete, Accurate Model?

The simulations Bostrom describes would not be precise to the subatomic level, but rather use abstractions to simplify the computation.  Instead of simulating every electron, proton, neutron, quark, etc in each person’s body and everything around us, it might only simulate synapses and neurons in our brains.  Such short-cuts would be extremely useful to accomplish the goals he describes of virtually resurrecting ancestors.  (A convenient version of heaven.)  Just simulating the brains of the inhabitants of a virtual world is drastically easier than accurately simulating an entire universe down to the subatomic level.  For many purposes, including the ones we are likely to engage in anytime soon, it is sufficient. 

The software to run a simplified simulation like this would put its designer in an interesting predicament whenever the simulatees decide to build a new particle accelerator or perform some other experiment that pushes the limits of their understanding of fundamental physics.  Would a dialog box appear on the simulation screen asking the designer to make decisions about how to treat a new class of quark that had never been observed?  Then once the designer answers this question the simulation moves on?  Moreover, so many trappings of modern life are the result of applications of scientific breakthroughs like this?  For example, we could have never built semiconductors and thus computers without a solid understanding of quantum mechanics since they take advantage of quantum effects.  So closing the dialog box would require not only require describing the results of this experiment, but also coding up a bunch of new high-level abstractions that represent things like semi-conductors.  The simulation would need to know when it could use the molecular mechanics model, and when it would have to substitute a more detailed model or a coding abstraction that simplifies the results of more base laws.

If we lived in such a simplified simulation, it seems likely that chinks in the armor of reality would periodically appear.  Modern science has few inconsistencies like this.  (The big bang and quantum randomness being the two biggest two exceptions IMHO.)  I would wager that if we live in a simulation it is a completely accurate physical model that started with the big bang and covers the entire universe including our own evolution from primordial soup.  It’s not clear to me whether or not our universe has enough matter/energy to build a computer powerful enough to run such a simulation.  I should dig up my notes from Yael Maguire’s excellent talk at Foo Camp on the fundamental limits of computation to be sure, but I know it would chew through at least solar systems worth of our universe if not galaxies or more to simulate a comparable universe.  It seems more likely to me that if our world is simulated then the “host world” is governed by a different set of physical laws.  This point is debatable and important, but I’ll assume from here that the host world is governed by different laws.

Motivations of the Simulation Designers and Implications for Personal Morality

As the NY Times article points out, the simulators might just be bored, doing the equivalent of playing video games with us.  Or they might be scientific researchers investigating how changes to fundamental laws affect how worlds evolve.  Whatever their goals are in running a simulation of this scale, they are almost certainly interested in the complexity that we are creating here and now.  But how should we behave?

Robin Hanson suggests that as individuals living in a simulation we should try to lead the most interesting, impactful lives that we can.  This goal attempts to optimize for the case that the simulators will pick individuals from this simulated society to do something special with.  I think it extremely unlikely that the designers care about individuals at all.  If they’re looking at anything, I’d bet it’s entire societies.  So, if we are living in a simulation, I argue that we should do our best to advance technology as an insurance policy against extinction.  I have written a fair bit about the transhuman morals that such a guiding principal implies, but basically it boils down to being a geek and/or a hippie – advance technology as fast as possible and conserve natural resources so that the world doesn’t end before we reach the next level of technology.  Thinking that somebody might hit the “stop” button on the entire simulation puts a new twist on the idea of the world ending because as a society we failed to reach a certain level of technological sophistication.

A Simulation Argument for Truth in Mathematical Beauty and Simplicity

If our world is a simulation running inside a massive computing device, then something must have programmed this simulation.  The programmers of the simulation chose the physical laws that we live by, perhaps to see what would happen.  This puts an interesting spin on evaluating fundamental physical laws.  Which of these two equations below is more likely to be an accurate representation of the way the simulation designer wrote the code?  These are two different mathematical representations of P.A.M. Dirac’s eponymous equation, which is AFAIK believed to be a completely accurate representation of our physical world.

By this logic, the second one is almost certainly closer to how the simulation programmer understood the concept.  This perspective puts an interesting twist on Occam’s razor – the principal that the simpler explanation is probably true.  My grandfather believed that the simpler a physical law was, the more likely it was to be correct.  In this way he saw a certain beauty in math and physics.  If our world exists only as a simulation, then the simpler a physical law is, the more likely it is to be an accurate representation of the way the simulation was coded.

At Foo Camp this past weekend, I took notes using three different technologies.  The results have led me to some interesting conclusions.  Here’s what I used:

• Day 1: I took notes on my Treo
• Day 2: I carried around my MacBook
• Day 3: I scribbled in a paper notebook

My notes from the first day are brief, but useful.  They are generally just names and short phrases.  They remind me of things that I found interesting and that I want to follow up on.  I used the notepad function in my PDA.  It was pretty easy to pop it open and jot something down.  Windows crashed on me of course, which prevented me from capturing a few things.  But overall it was pretty handy.

My notes from the second day are very sparse.  I have a few blog entries that are 5% written and an e-mail draft.  There isn’t a lot here.  I carried my laptop around because I was presenting that day, and wanted to be able to practice and tweak my slides.  I also saw some other people engaging in really high-bandwidth communication with the net using laptops and thought I could too.  The real thing that got in the way was startup time.  Even though OS X is really pretty good at this, the several seconds it takes to turn on and connect to the net got in the way of capturing ideas.  I think another problem was my own fault — I tried to put information in the form that it would be ultimately used rather than just quickly jot down reminders.  Having the ability to author the content in the format it would be ultimately used tempted me to do so, but it wasn’t the best choice in retrospect.  It’s also somewhat anti-social.

My notes from the third day are fabulous.  I have many names and URLs and ideas and drawings and numbers.  The paper notebook took no time to boot up, to load a writing app, a contact management app, a drawing app — they’re all instantly available.  It never crashed.  Switching contexts in it was as easy as flipping a page.

My conclusion is that for this kind of fast-paced environment, reducing barriers to capturing ideas is critical.  A critical measure is the latency from deciding to record something to being done recording it.  By this measure, the paper notebook was the hands-down winner.  As Tim noted, fewer people were carrying laptops, maybe for this reason.

Digression into personal projects…

This problem is what inspired me to build Offbrain, which allows you to record ideas in the cloud using a cellphone for later retrieval.  I’ve seen people using Twitter for this, which I think is a great application.  I might switch to that technique, but it requires looking at twitter in a slightly different light, since very few of my friends want to be plugged into my random-idea-stream that closely, and I often want to capture ideas that I don’t want to disclose publicly. 

I’m re-inspired to finish the SMS gateway for Offbrain.  Since we always have our cell phones and we’ve co-evolved (with our handsets) the ability to quickly jam out li’l notes very fast, SMS offers a great low-latency way to capture ideas for a lot of people.  I think I’m going to borrow Gina Trapani’s command-line interface for task tracking as an SMS command language for Offbrain.  (Thanks, Gina!)  I was impressed with her talk about it — this UI has clearly evolved through a lot of iterations to become a simple, effective, powerful way to record and categorize action items.  Offering a todo.txt export should be an easy and useful hack too.  The obvious follow-ups are hosted todo.txt in the sky with multiple access methods including web, web services, SMS, etc.  Beginning to sound more and more like twitter.  Hmmm…

Thanks to Steve Garfield for the picture.  Yay for CC saving me the trouble of taking my own.

A little while ago I heard an interesting story on NPR about collaborative music software.  They described a series of websites that empower geographically separated musicians to create music collaboratively.  Using sites like ejamming, Musicians can find additional band members, share tracks and mix your own tracks with those of your partners across the net.  They even hint at being able to practice with each other live, although I’ve never tried it.

All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up.  For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album was created by two musicians living in different cities who sent tapes back and forth by mail to create the music. 

Now sites like JamGlue and SpliceMusic make this kind of collaboration possible for anybody musically inclined.  It’ll be fun to hear the first big successes from this new kind of band.  You might even call them a transhuman bands since they’ll using modern technology to overcome human geographic limitations to creating music.

I’m ready to introduce a little pet project to the world: Offbrain Mobile Memory Services.  Right now it’s a very simple web app that just keeps track of lists of things.  The only thing that makes it at all interesting right now is that the UI is optimized for display on mobile browsers. 

It’s modeled after the fabulous mobile gmail interface.  Offbrain’s pages are typically between 1k and 1.5k total — they load very snappily on very slow mobile links.  (Assuming dreamhost hasn’t swapped the app or the database into virtual memory — a perennial problem with cheap shared hosting.)  And by using extremely simple HTML (think 1994) the pages display very nicely on a 240×240 pixel screen like you’ll find on a cell phone.

The idea of the service is to take notepad and list functionality that has been standard in PDAs and PIMs forever, and move it into the information cloud.  Make it accessible through web, e-mail and SMS so it’s accessible anywhere you have a cellphone.  This way you’ll never forget to bring your shopping list to the store again because you’ll always have your phone with you.  Even better, since it’s stored in the cloud, you and your family members can share a group list, which would never have been possible with paper or traditional PDAs.

My buddy Ben and I even came up with a cool way to monetize this free-to-consumers service as a business.  We entered the idea in the UW Business Plan Competition which provided me the necessary motivation to build the beta that’s now live and to do the necessary research into how to connect it to a real SMS gateway.  (Thanks to Jordan Schwartz for all the tips.)

My real goal of course here is to support the upcoming robot revolution by encouraging people to move more of their active minds into computers.  Encourage is a strong word.  Enable.  Moral capitalism requires offering services that are mutually beneficial to all parties with full disclosure of all known information.  By this criterion I think I’m totally in the clear so long as I explain to y’all what I’m up to.

Once I actually wire up the SMS interface, I’m gonna totally use this all the time.  Anytime I want to remember something and I don’t have my journal in front of me, I’m just gonna whip out my cell phone and send a text message to my external brain (my Offbrain) so it’ll remember it for me.

And yes, despite all my whining, I wrote it in Ruby on Rails.  Annoying as the language is for complex projects, it works really nicely for a quick and dirty app like this.

My old pal Stephen Hawking has been in the news a lot today for going on a vomet-comet ride.  (Okay, we’re not really old pals, but we’ve chatted a couple of times, notably at my grandpa’s memorial service where he gave a really touching eulogy.)  At a press conference before his flight, Stephen said:

"Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped
out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a
genetically engineered virus or other dangers."

On this point I completely agree with him.  This idea was a key point I made in my recent Ignite talk on Transhuman Morality.  We’re going to wipe ourselves out.  But as far as what we should do about it, Stephen and I disagree.  He sees space travel as the route to salvation.  This planet is getting burned up, so we’d better find a new one, so the logic goes.  I think this line of reasoning is unrealistic and even reckless.  The idea that we can stop worrying about saving this planet is the reckless part.  Having an out like this encourages people to act irresponsibly.

The reason why it’s unrealistic is more subtle.  I said at Ignite that we won’t be flying around in space ships visiting other planets like in Star Trek, and people hassled me about it.  I know this is a little heretical for a futurist to say, but I believe it.  I should clarify a bit: I think it’s likely we’ll visit the other planets in our solar system — there’s plenty of useful matter here that we can mine and put to good use.  But a physical conscious entity leaving this solar system is tantamount to suicide as far as any relationship that entity could hope to maintain with the culture here is concerned.  The recent discovery of an earth-like planet only 20 years away puts this idea into perspective.  Even if we could make a trip at an average speed of half light speed, (a reasonably aggressive goal considering the need to accelerate and decelerate) a round-trip would take 80 years.  80 years ago the world saw the first telephone trans-atlantic telephone call.  In another 80 years, many believe we will have hit the information singularity meaning who knows what will be here.  Return would be nearly impossible, and almost certainly pointless since the world one would return to would be completely alien.  Leaving to colonize?  Possible I suppose, but good luck.  And at that point I really don’t think there would be any motivation.

My main point is that by the time we have sufficient technology for interstellar travel, we won’t have physical bodies any more.  The robot revolution will be complete.  As a society we will be much more concerned with creating faster computers in which to store our consciousnesses than with whatever we think we’d achieve by leaving the solar system.  Colonization might take the form of transmitting executable programs that represent our personalities into deep space with the hopes that some society will pick them up and try to execute them on whatever hardware they have.  Or perhaps sending out a nano-seed that knows how to build a receiver to pick up such a signal.  But it’s hard to imagine sending a physical copy of the data that represent our personalities in a format that’s compressed enough that it could be executable, while including the plans for making a more powerful computer to run on.  If we were at this stage, the only reason to do so would be because we had converted all the physical matter in our solar system to become information processing machinery and we needed more raw material with which to represent our thoughts.  That day may come, but it will not be soon.

So I agree we should continue to pursue space exploration, because it helps advance technology.  But it is not a way out of our pressing environmental concerns.  The world needs geeks to transcend beyond biological bodies.  But geeks need hippies to keep the world around for long enough to get there.

[Vomet comet picture courtesy of Kevin Boydston.]

Charles Stross’s book Accelerando has a hilarious scene where a highly-augmented human loses his glasses which are his primary interface to the computer systems which support his thinking.  The character is so used to relying on these external systems for support that his immediate response is "Who am I?"  In first aid, we learn to rank somebody’s level of alertness and orientation by asking them if they know their name, where they are, what time it is and what happened, getting additional points for each successively harder question.  Without his glasses, this human was unable to answer even the easiest question, and would be medically classified as verbally responsive, but neither alert nor oriented.

When I was on vacation recently I realized I was close to being put into a similar situation.  When traveling abroad, I’m always keenly aware of what happens to me if my stuff gets stolen or otherwise lost.  I always follow a best practice of keeping my passport, plane tickets home and cash very close to my body in a place that’s not easily accessible.  On this last trip I realized that if I were left with just these things I would likely have no way to contact my friends and family back home.  Where we were, there wasn’t much internet.  Just about the only phone numbers I have memorized were those of my traveling companions.  Mom?  Dad?  Best friends?  Nope.  They’re in the phone.  And the phone could easily get lost or disabled.  (I should be so lucky as to have to replace that piece of junk.)

When I realized this, I copied down some key phone numbers onto a piece of paper in my money belt.  Not a big deal, but an interesting realization about how much of my working set has been externalized.

Tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM I’m flying to Mexico to enjoy spring break.  And tonight, according to congress, Daylight Savings Time begins, which means the clocks should move ahead an hour.  The real question is if the computers which are running the clocks are going to listen to congress or not.

Normally I preach that network time is so much more reliable than manual, independent clocks that drift.  But today is totally different.  I’m trying to figure out what alarm I can set to wake up in time to get to the airport.

I can’t trust my "smart" cell phone.  No way that thing’s gonna get the time change right.  It’ll probably start spewing smoke at 2am tonight, based on its crappy behavior at the last DST switch.

I can’t trust the alarm in my Sonos, which usually wakes me up to KUOW.

I spent a while racking my brain to figure out which of my alarm systems was actually disconnected from the net.  It took me a while to remember, but my good old clock radio is disconnected.  As we approach the singularity and the world slowly wakes up, this problem is just going to get more pronounced.  Which is why we need to move to central configuration for things like this that can be changed by policy.

My advice: don’t trust any reminders coming from devices running on network time for the next 3 weeks.  If punctuality matters to you, double check everything against your wrist watch.  Unless you got one that runs windows.  (Sucker.)

The nice folks at Ignite posted videos for the rest of our talks from the second Ignite night, including my presentation on Why only Geeks and Hippies can save the world.  Watching it, I see that it’s a lot rougher than I remember.  The text as I intended to deliver it is available here, which might be a bit more coherent.  Anyway, here’s the video:

Enjoy!