Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.

About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

This reasoning is IMHO flawed and overly optimistic.  It’s an interesting idea to compare the complexity of these two systems by comparing their bit representations.  I think the idea has merit, at a very rough level — that is I think you can compare the complexity of a genome to the complexity of a piece of software on a rough order-of-magnitude scale. The biggest flaw in Kurzweil’s argument is that he magically throws in a factor of 16x improvement in his favor by saying the genome can be “compressed.”  Well, software executables can be compressed too, a fact that Kurzweil conveniently ignores.  So I’d follow his reasoning to say that a human brain simulator probably needs about 10 – 100 million lines of code.  (I’m deliberately including 0 significant digits here to indicate the roughness of this approximation.)  This puts a human brain simulator on par with the some of world’s most sophisticated software projects so far, which seems about right, at least to an order of magnitude or so.

Strong reactions

PZ Myers published a wrathful condemnation of Kurzweil’s argument titled “Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain.”  If you sift through the name-calling you see that Myers assumes a specific tactic in building the brain simulator: starting with the human genome and deriving the brain’s functionality from it.  This strategy will certainly work, once we have solved the protein-folding problem, and more generally have the ability to do quantum chemical simulations of kilogram-sized masses of organic chemicals.  Which is to say it’s theoretically possible (we might be living in a software simulation of our universe for all we know), but completely intractable with current technology.  For comparison, our best quantum chemical simulations if you push them top out at maybe a dozen atoms right now.  So being able to simulate an entire kilogram of organic matter is nowhere in sight.

Tactics to simulation

I agree with Myers that we are nowhere near being able to interpret the genome well enough to understand how it makes a brain.  But we probably don’t need to in order to simulate a brain.  By analogy, consider the Super Nintendo (SNES) Emulator, which is another kind of simulator many of us have experience with.

SNES emulators let you play all the old Nintendo games but on a modern computer instead of original SNES hardware.  Let’s say somebody handed you a box and a stack of cartridges and told you to build a Nintendo simulator.  What would you do?  Well, clearly you could open up the SNES box and reverse engineer the circuit boards to figure out all the wiring.  You’d probably figure out that the CPU was important — a variant on the 65816, which was essentially the 16-bit version of the 6502 some of us grew up with in our Commodore 64s and Atari 800s.  So you could (theoretically) crack open the 65816 CPU chip itself, put it the through an electron microscope and understand every transistor it used to interpret the instructions. In this way you could reliably create an emulator which completely replicated every aspect of the SNES. Such a simulation would replicate all of its bugs, timing quirks and everything, but it would work and be extremely expensive to simulate.

This is analogous to the tactic PZ Myers seems to be assuming Kurzweil would take to simulating a human brain. But Kurzweil would actually start at a much higher level of abstraction.  Simulating every protein in every neuron is like building an SNES emulator by simulating every transistor in the original Nintendo’s hardware. The key to getting those SNES games to work does not lie in replicating the design of the CPU which interprets the instructions.  The key is figuring out how to run those instructions on modern hardware.  By moving up through levels of abstraction, we can simulate the system much more cheaply and easily, although there’s a chance edge-case behavior won’t be captured properly.  (What if our world is a simulation and we bump into the edge-cases?)

Similarly, the key to simulating a human brain anytime soon does not lie in understanding every chemical pathway in human neurons.  Although if we did understand neurons at this level, we would have a great head start at simulating a brain.  Success in simulating a human brain will come by recognizing higher levels of abstraction in neuronal function.  We have known for a very long time that neurons communicate by “firing” electrical signals which are transmitted chemically at synapses.  The details of these behaviors are complex and determined by a great many interdependent chemical systems, but it seems highly likely that we can replicate the key behaviors of human neurons at this level of abstraction without needing to understand everything underneath supporting them.  If we can replicate the firing behavior of neurons in sufficient detail, we don’t care what the proteins underlying them are doing.  The key question here of course is what is “sufficient detail.”  I expect that question is one that researchers who are genuinely interested in reverse-engineering the brain will actually focus their attention on.

Once we can simulate the firing behavior of neurons, simulating a brain becomes much more of an engineering problem than a scientific one.  Still it’s going to be a massive engineering challenge, and gathering the input data will probably require a bunch of new science.  Then the philosophers can debate the meaning of free-will if our brains are Turing-complete.

The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.

Others have described it as “a step toward the superbrain” or even ”the most interesting project in human history.”

I agree that this project is extremely important.  In my mind, this line of research is the only reliable way to achieve AI – artificial intelligence.  There’s little doubt in my mind that a sufficiently powerful computer could simulate in detail the operation of every neuron in a human brain.  Someday we’ll get there.  If you buy the argument so far, then the only thing standing between us and strong AI is an extremely detailed scan of a brain — down to the sub-neuron level.  In principal this should be possible by freezing a brain, slicing it up into very thin sections, and scanning them.  More sophisticated 3-D imaging techniques might even make this possible without having to cut somebody’s head off, but I’m not necessarily counting on that.  Besides, for the purpose of creating artificial intelligence, we just need to do this once, and it doesn’t even need to be perfect.

In the past, I’ve explored the question of whether or not such an AI would have free will.  This fascinating question about the nature of consciousness is fairly abstract, along with other ones related to the nature of consciousness, and what destructive uploading means to the person whose head gets cut off and sliced up.  (Do you just take a nap when they cut your head off, and then wake up inside the computer?  What happens when they spin up a second process?  Etc. Etc. Etc.)  But all of this philosophizing pales when I realize they’re actually doing it!

IBM is supplying one of their Blue Gene/L “supercomputers” with 8,000 processors — definitely cool hardware.  I’m not sure what supercomputer really means in the era of massively parallel cloud computing, but maybe this is exactly it.  Read more in their FAQ.  Or watch this TED talk:

Thanks to Joe Duck for digging this one up.

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’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, and I figured tonight might be my last chance.  Plenty of people have been worrying about how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could destroy the planet by creating small black-holes that might suck in the entire earth.  As the good folks at CERN re-assure us, everything is fine.  I pretty much believe this.  That is to say, I’m pretty sure LHC will not destroy all life as we know it.  Pretty sure.  Otherwise, we’ve all got a few more hours to live.

So long as my buddy Stephen Hawking’s theories about black holes are true, we’re fine.  They’ll dissipate by themselves and will not suck in the planet.  But to be clear, we are testing this theory.  (I just heard a scientist on the radio trip all over himself as he tried to spurt out a believable
"there really is no chance these black-holes will devour the entire
earth.")

Last year I wrote about a then-briefly-popular idea that all the world we see is actually a computer simulation.  (Pointless personal anecdaote — I had this idea in grade-school and tried to marry it with special relativity’s universal speed-limit in terms of a primitively digitized simulation where exceeding the speed of light would cause objects to skip pixels during a single time step.  Anyway.)  It’s all as if our whole universe is a game of The Sims on some hyper-intelligent alien teenager’s computer.  In a fairly religious way, this idea is unrefutable.  It’s like a virtual machine trying to hack its host operating system.  Can’t do it.

Some theories of simulated worlds hold that what we experience is a simplification of real physical laws.  If this is true, high-energy experiments like LHC could probe the limits of these simplifications.  It could cause an exception to get thrown in the simulation code.  Us clever scientists set up some extremely complex scenario that caused one of the simulation’s assumptions to fail.  What happens when the simulation crashes?  Maybe it’s a dialog box saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore."  Maybe it’s a universe-scale Blue screen of death.  Teenager’s response?  Maybe Abort.  How different is that from our whole planet getting sucked into a black hole?

Don’t panic.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

"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.]

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.

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.)

Enjoy!

First, a little computer science background.  Turing completeness is the idea that a computing system has the same capabilities as a universal Turing machine.  This theoretical machine moves along a long tape which has various symbols on it that the machine can read and write.  The machine itself is always in one internal state, but will change to different states based on its programming and input.  It is programmed by a huge state transition table which says "if you’re in state X, and you’re reading symbol Y, then write symbol Z, move left n spaces, and switch to state W" for all possible states and symbols.  It turns out that with a long enough tape and enough states this device can do just about anything you think of a computer being able to do.  In fact, computer scientists have shown that every modern computer system is functionally equivalent to a Turing machine.  That is to say all modern computers are Turing complete.  It’s useful because it’s simple enough to prove theorems about.  Some important things we know about Turing machines and anything which is functionally equivalent to one:

• Turing machines are deterministic — given a set of inputs they’ll always reach the same output.
• It’s impossible to reliably predict whether or not a program on a Turing machine will ever finish.

I see two ways to interpret the question of whether or not a human brain is Turing complete.  The first one is "Can a human brain perform the same functions as a Turing machine?"  I think that given a pen, paper, and enough patience the answer is clearly yes.  But that’s not the question that interests me.

As a transhumanist, the interesting question for me is "Can a Turing-complete computer perform the same functions as a human brain?"  This question is important to me because if the answer is yes, then it is possible for a computer to simulate a human personality.  That is to say uploading of a human consciousness into a computer is possible.  I’m going to dodge the detailed analysis of this question today, and get back to it in a later article.  For now, let’s assume the answer is "Yes" and see what that implies about free will.

Remember that theorem that says Turing machines are deterministic?  That is, once you start it going with a given set of inputs, that it’s always going to reach the same answer?  If this were true for us as humans, then we would have no free will — our actions would be entirely determined by our current state and our surroundings.  We might think we are making choices, but in fact a fast computer could run the same calculation and tell us what our answer would be before we thought we had decided.  So by this logic if uploading is possible, then humans have no free will.  Troubling, eh?

Fortunately, I think the above analysis has a flaw.  Let’s dive down a little deeper into neurochemistry.  Neurons fire as a result of electro-chemical processes.  Basic chemistry tells us that the rates of chemical reactions are deterministic based on concentrations of the relevant input chemicals.  But if you took stat-mech then you learned that these predicted rates are actually just statistical averages and that they’re only accurate if the brazillions of molecules involved happen to collide with each other at a constant frequency as they randomly bounce around in solution.  And quantum mechanics tells us that this apparently random bouncing around is in fact, to Einstein’s chagrin, truly random — god does play dice with the universe.  (I’m not sure I completely buy this, but I’ll have to save that for another article too.  Yes, I know that the Bell inequalities were experimentally observed in the 1980’s but it still sits funny with me.  Sorry grandpa.  More on this later.)  Because of this randomness, the instantaneous rate of any chemical reaction will vary randomly, while still averaging around the classically predicted rate.  So the upshot is that neurons don’t behave completely deterministically, but that the exact timing of neurons firing has a truly (quantum) random component to it.

Now this implies quite firmly that our brains cannot be simulated by a Turing machine since Turing machines can’t act randomly, and thus wouldn’t be able to properly simulate the randomness of neurons firing.  But if we modify a Turing machine slightly so that a spot on its tape read a different random symbol each time you check, I think we’re good.  Given this, it seems reasonable that a modern computer that has a source of truly random data could simulate a brain.  Some have argued that we need quantum computers to simulate consciousness, but I don’t think so.  (Again, more on this later.)

Computers are pretty good at generating psuedo-random data internally, and by listening to the outside world (hard drive vibration, microphones, etc) can generate what is probably actually random data.  If true randomness is really important, we can build small accessory cards that sample thermal noise on
a resistor and produce large volumes of truly (quantum) random data.  Some advanced cryptographic systems do this today.  So it’s totally possible today to build this modified Turing machine that also incorporates random input.

Now our transhuman dilemma is solved.  The essence of free will lies in the quantum randomness of electro-chemical processes in our brain.  Moreover, it will be possible to upload our personalities into computers, complete with our free wills in tact, by incorporating random processes into the hardware that simulates our brains.  If the computers we upload into are only psuedo-random (as almost all software is today), we will appear to have free will, in fact we will believe that we have it, but we will in fact be total robots.  Now, who can come up with a Turing test for free will?

[[Thanks to Barry Brummit.  This article is a rehash of a couple good conversations we had over New Year's and this morning after yoga practice.]]

I’m here to talk about a system of morality that’s based on the upcoming end of society as we know it.  I’ll explain why only geeks and hippies can save the world.  I’m serious — I’m talking about the possible destruction of everything we know and care about.

Let’s look forward to the next 1,000 years.  What’s life going to be like?  Are we going to be flying around in spaceships visiting other planets like in Star Trek?  I don’t think so.  Or will we be killing each other over the last few gallons of gasoline like in Mad Max?  Maybe, and this is what I’m really scared of.  Or will the machines have risen up to try to destroy us like in Terminator?  Again maybe, but I’m not really worried about this, and I’ll explain why.

Now look back a billion years ago.  That’s when life first showed up.  And then a million years ago humans showed up.  Just a thousand years ago they had printing presses, and a hundred years ago we had cars and ten years ago we had google.  Progress is speeding up faster and faster exponentially and it’s not going to stop.

What’s happening is that people are getting smarter and more capable of solving complex problems both by themselves and by collaborating with others using tools like e-mail and text messaging.  Our brains are slowly starting to merge with computers.  Look at cell phones: who here actually remembers any phone numbers any more?  And who cares?  We don’t need to.

We’re heading towards what’s known as The Information Singularity.  This is where human brains and computers actually merge into the same thing.  When this happens technology will progress so fast that un-aided humans will be completely unable to keep up.  This is where all of our technology is heading.  But you know, we might never get there.

What if there was a nuclear war?  How far back would that set us?  100 years?  100,000 years?  Would we ever be able to get back to where we are?  Maybe not.  That could be the complete end to evolution as we know it.  Nuclear war’s not the only way this could happen either.

Imagine that somebody got so pissed off that they bio-engineered a super-virus to kill all white people.  And it accidentally killed all people.  Or what if global warming got to the point where the weather is so bad that advanced society just can’t exist?  The ecosystem could collapse.  We could run out of energy resources.  Gray goo.

I believe that in the next thousand years something is going to render our planet uninhabitable to life as we know it.  And the question is, when that day comes, will we be ready for it?  Will technology have advanced to the point where we don’t need life as we know it in order to preserve what we really care about?

Well what is it that we really care about?  This is the critical question facing our society right now.  We can’t close our eyes and hope it just goes away — it won’t.  Now some will say “EARTH FIRST!  People made this problem and we need to back off and let nature fix itself.”  But I don’t buy that.  I say we embrace the chaos and push forwards.  Here’s why.

I believe that the most valuable thing in the world is complex thought, information, ideas, memes, logic, reason, discussion, art, emotion.  All of these things are way more important to me than things like birds.  Or plants.  Or even humans.  Because we don’t need bodies to listen to music.  Or to tell stories. Or to fall in love.

We can achieve salvation through technology.  When the upcoming robot revolution arrives, I say we let the robots win.  Don’t fight them — join them!  Let’s cast off these weak unreliable human bodies and transcend to a society of pure thoughts and ideas.

We can do it!  We can build a network of computers powerful enough to hold all of us at once.  We can upload our consciousnesses into these computers by simulating the human brain in software.  It’s an incredibly hard problem — way harder than say simulating the weather.  But we can do it.  Computers are getting faster and faster all the time and likewise our understanding of the brain is getting better and better.  Someday soon we will be able to simulate an entire brain in software down to the very last neuron and when that happens, that computer will actually have the personality of a real human being.  It’ll work because there is no quantum soul.  We are nothing but our neuronal structure.

Some people will miss having bodies.  They’ll miss things like kayaking and eating food.  But they won’t miss dying.  Just like nobody misses having a warm fire to come home to in their cave.

You know, our lives are pretty darned good here and now.  So I gotta ask: What are you going to do with this?  Are you just going to play?  Be a hedonist?  Or do you want to do something that matters with your life?  Do you want to work to preserve complex thought and information into the next millennium?  It’s up to you.

But if you do want to help, listen to Avi.  Install compact fluorescent bulbs.  Shop at Madison Market and support sustainable agriculture.  Get political and try to calm down the crazies who want to blow everything up.  In other words, be a hippie.  We might not be able to stop the fall,  but we can definitely postpone it.  Hopefully for long enough.

Or work from the other side to speed up technology.  Talk to Bre about building robots.  Write educational software to make people smarter.  Work on communication tools.  Research how the brain works and how to connect it directly to computers.  In other words, be a geek.

Because it’s the geeks and the hippies who are going to preserve what’s really important into the next millennium.  If you ask me, to not do so is to act immorally. This system of morality is based on two axiomatic assumptions:

1) We cannot keep going like this forever.

2) Complex thought and information are more valuable than nature and life.

If you’d like to read more about this, Kurzweil has written lots of good books on the singularity.  My good buddy Mez has written a fabulous book on relevant technology trends.  Or you can read my blog at embracingchaos.com.  Thanks.

The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational.  A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know existed.  I wrote about the bridge breaking competition.  There will be another Make Magazine competition this time around, but I won’t spoil the surprise.  Brady and Bre have promised us more space since it was so packed last time around.

So if you’re in town and want to hear me blather, come by the CHAC next Tuesday, February 13th at 8:30 pm for talks.  (Or even better, at 6:30 for the Make Contest which should be rad.)  Hope to see y’all there!

So while I’m always happy to go there and get some  hands-on market research and competitive analysis done, or try to close some deals with partners, I’m also generally just as happy to go home.  This year, I didn’t even cruise the show at all, except to go between our booth and conference rooms, which was fine with me.  Until I got home and saw pictures like this…

CES 2007 was the unveiling of the prototype hardware for Nick Negroponte’s $100 laptop, now called XO (or is it OX?), and delivered under the program "One Laptop Per Child" or OLPC. 

I absolutely love this initiative.  I consider contributing to it to be one of the most moral things anybody can do with their lives.  It is one of the only means I can foresee that could help bring the continent of Africa out of poverty — pure grass roots education.  A life goal of mine is to try to help enable children’s education to be limited only by their talent and motivation, not by their surroundings.  OLPC is trying to do this.  Someday soon I hope to help.

In this context, moral actions are those that increase the
probability that as a species we achieve technological salvation before we blow
ourselves up. I’d like to explore what
this means in very practical terms by analyzing a number of jobs I’ve had and
considered and seen my friends do over the years.

SEO for e-Commerce

I once seriously considered a job doing Search Engine
Optimization for an e-Commerce company. They offered me truckloads of money to get their web pages to the top of
the google rankings. The work would have
been technically fascinating, but I ended up rejecting the job largely on moral
grounds. I just couldn’t feel good
about the work I’d be doing.

Even without a transhuman perspective, this job clearly has a zero-sum impact on society. Reverse-engineering pagerank isn’t actually building value. Move sales away from other companies and
towards your own only has a positive impact on society if you genuinely believe
your company is creating more value for the consumer than your competitors
do. This kind of corporate
righteousness is dangerous and I just didn’t believe it.

Pure marketing efforts like SEO might as well be selling
used-cars for all the good it has on the long-term story-arc of humanity.

Electronic Music Systems

While at first blush this might seem trivial, I actually do
consider this work (my current primary employment) to be moral from a
transhuman perspective.

Making it easier for people to consume music they love makes
their leisure time more efficient and effective. This makes people happier. Following the logic of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human needs, happy people
have more energy to devote to other causes. So by making people happier, I’m creating more capacity to solve the
meaningful problems. It’s an indirect
effect, but I think it is helping.

A reasonable counter-argument to this is that great creativity
often seems to come from the emotionally tortured, especially in the fine
arts. But I don’t think this pattern
holds up for great scientists and engineers.

Direct Political Activism

There are many reasons to consider the current political
regime in the US immoral from a transhuman perspective. The war on terror stands a chance of cutting
this whole conversation short by achieving the dystopian outcome in this
generation. Stifling stem-cell research
is directly preventing technological advancement. Regressive judgmental social policies like discrimination based
on sexual preference makes many people miserable and stifles creativity per the
earlier Maslow argument. This
government is certainly doing plenty to bring about the eventual destruction of
our technologically advanced society.

But the pendulum of politics swings very naturally back and
forth.  (As evidenced by last week’s election.)  Convincing a few people to
change their votes really doesn’t matter much because the aggregate political
mood has a will of its own. Trying to
alter that will by changing fundamental systems like openness of the press or
campaign funding policies or society’s sense of engagement in politics is
definitely more worthwhile since that work is better leveraged. But working on kicking out the current
damaging regime is a short-term fix that will just get undone after another
political cycle. There is a small
chance that kicking them out prevents catastrophe, and for that reason it’s
worthwhile, but I still haven’t lost my faith in the checks and balances in the
whole system.

Renewable Energy

Running out of energy resources is one easy-to-foresee way
that our advanced society could collapse. As such, work on renewable energy helps to delay or even prevent this
set of doomsday scenarios.

This work is decidedly moral because it extends our runway
giving us longer to do what we need to before things go seriously south. This provides an indirect linear improvement
in the situation. Indirect because it’s
only addressing one possible set of doomsday scenarios. Linear because it’s directly combating the
problem directly – it’s not clear how good work here enables faster development
of good work in other areas.  But this definitely helps.

Research into Neuroscience, Robotics, Computational Linguistics, etc

These and other fields offer great promise in the near term
to advance technology in the direction of technological salvation. A confluence of these technologies with a
few that we don’t understand yet have the potential to realize various scifi
visions of overcoming the physical limitations that will otherwise painfully
drag us back to a more primitive existence.

As such, work in these fields is directing helping to solve
the problem. This is highly moral
work.  It is leveraged in that these advances will spur other advances.

Working on Internet Explorer or Google

Almost 10 years ago I got to contribute in a very small way to IE5.  Back then browsers were still evolving quickly.  It’s not as clear of the value or working on Firefox today, but back then building better browser technology was one of the most
direct contributions to increased human intelligence. Today the best analogy would probably be working on search for Google or MSN.  The ubiquitization of the internet has dramatically improved
people’s ability to solve complex problems quickly. I really don’t know what technological salvation will involve,
but I am sure that getting there will require solving a great many complex
problems.

Work like this that facilitates human communication and
problem solving is extremely moral. By
facilitating all forms of problem-solving, it is accelerating the pace of
advancement in nearly every other field we can consider. This kind of exponential growth is what
we’re gonna need to avoid the bad scenarios.

e-Learning

Electronic learning systems have the potential to improve
the quality of education for everybody everywhere. This means enabling people to better solve complex problems in a
very direct way: they’re smarter.

I firmly believe that the next decade is going to see a
revolution in education at all levels. The net result will be an educational system which is extremely
meritocratic, enabling anybody who is motivated to achieve intellectual skills
close to their full intrinsic potential. A smarter population will make solving every technological challenge in
the future easier. As such, I currently
don’t see any activity more moral than building electronic learning systems.

The idea behind this saying is that times of rapid change are generally quite painful.  Historically interesting times are those involving wars and revolutions — things where lots of people die.  Growth and improvement have only come through very slow gradual change.  But in today’s China, this is anything but true.  Right now is one of the most interesting times in China’s long history, and for the majority of the country, it’s fantastic.  (If we all work hard, that kind of intersting time might be behind us.)

We read about how the Chinese economy is glowing red hot.  Their sustained GDP growth rate would make any head of a western central bank terrified.  In any established economy, a 9% annual growth rate would last maybe a couple years before it turned into inflation, recession or both.  But a very clever set of communist economists are managing to ride the bleeding edge of rapid growth far longer and further than I think anybody outside the country would have believed possible.  I’ve been reading these cold dry numbers in the same places you have.  But being here in China now, these numbers are very real.

Consider Shenzhen, just across the psuedo-international border with Hongkong.  Today Shenzhen’s greater metropolitan area has over 10 million people.  But just 28 years ago when Deng Xiaoping decided to start developing this city, it had but 25,000.  Imagine that — a city nearly the size of LA or NY that was consciously willed into existence in less then a generation.  It almost defies belief.

Having just left Shenzhen, I’m currently in Xiamen, which is the closest mainland city to Taiwan.  On a clear day like today, you can see outlying islands that are politically controlled by the Republic of China, the Taiwanese government.  There is a large and famous sign here pointed out towards Taiwan that reads "One Country, Two systems, Together One China."  The Taiwanese have a similar sign on the other side.

NPR recently aired a story about the northern border of North Korean.  There’s a theme park that is constantly empty and a small family whose job might be simply to picnic under an umbrella to demonstrate to the outside world how happy and successful the closed communist system in North Korea is.  Possibly for similar reasons, Xiamen also has a theme park on the coast facing Taiwan.  But its big roller coaster is occupied until 4:00 AM every night.  On weekends happy local families fill the beaches with their families.  I came here for a holiday 5.5 years ago during Spring Festival.  There are so many new buildings and bridges and tunnels and freeways that I hardly recognize it now.  Real estate prices boggle the mind in a way that only Manhattenites could imagine.  There is also a huge new "trourist ferry terminal" under construction here.  Its stated plans are for ferry service to Hong Kong and to host cruise ships.  The obvious long-term purpose of this project is in the fulfillment of that big red sign. 

Shenzhen is thriving as a psuedo-port for the reunification of Hong Kong.  I have no doubt that within 10 or 20 years, Xiamen will be doing the same with Taiwan.  All polluting factories have been ordered out of Xiamen in order to clean up the air.  The communists clearly want to make Xiamen attractive.  I used to buy in to the American political ideas that we must protect Taiwan from China’s oppressive government.  Taiwanese certainly used to look at it this way — a friend grew up there singing songs about how they would liberate the mainlanders from the communists.  But taking a longer term view of the situation, if I were a Taiwanese resident today, I would look forward to reunification with the world’s largest economy.

Again, talk about economics can easily obscure what’s really happening here.  Millions of people are graduating from poor subsistance lifestyles up to the comfort and safety of a working class life.  Or up to the relative luxury of a middle-class life.  Or even to the genuine luxury of being able to buy whatever they want — it’s not that uncommon here.  The difference in the quality of life of my friends and the other people I see here is obvious from just 5 years ago — be it having hot water in every room of the house, owning a car, or kite-surfing in their spare time.  These huge cities are physical manifestations of people’s lives being improved on a grand historic scale.  The excitement is palpable.  Positive energy infuses everything.  A note to Naomi Klein: this is what sweat-shops do to people’s lives.  These certainly are interesting times, and I feel priveledged to be able to experience them first-hand.

There were lots of page-search engines along the lines of Alta Vista.  They crawled the web and indexed the contents of each web page.  They would try to figure out which web page best matched your search keywords based entirely on the contents of the pages themselves.  This didn’t work very well since spammers could fill their pages with keywords they liked that didn’t necessarily add any value to you.

Yahoo searched a database that was built manually instead of by crawling.  Yahoo’s staff would catalog thousands of web sites and categorize them according to keywords.  This provided a higher level of quality since a human reviewed every entry, but they were having trouble keeping up with the explosive growth of the net.

Then there was these two punk Stanford kids with their upstart Google.  Google was a lot more like Alta Vista than Yahoo in that they automatically crawled and indexed the entire web.  But they judged which pages were useful not based on what was on the page itself, but on other pages on the net that link to it.

We all know who won.  But I’d like to share a perspective on why that uses a political analogy. Google democratized search.  Yahoo was based on a communist model.  Alta Vista was complete anarchy.  Democracy won because it gives power to the people, and the aggregate opinion of millions of people is almost always better than even a carefully chosen set of experts.

Yahoo’s model was analogous to having a central politburo that makes all decisions.  Provided the politburo is skilled and benevolent, this can be a great solution.  But if the system they control gets too big, it just won’t work.  Alta Vista’s ranking system gave everybody speaking equal say in what happened, which amounted to total anarchy.  Google allowed every web page on the net to cast a vote on which pages were the most important ones.  (Beyond that, the pagerank system iterates so that some votes coming from more important pages count more than other votes — the details of implementation are always key.)  Information democracy is achieved by giving everybody a say in what’s important and aggregating the reults.

There are numerous examples of democratic services completely obsoleteing services based on communist editorial systems.  Wikipedia democratized the encyclopedia and has replaced Encarta.  Youtube democratized internet video clips and replaced iFilm.  In many more cases, the democratic service hasn’t replaced the centrally-controlled services, but provides a strong alternative.  E-Bay democratized shopping.  Blogs have democratized news.  Open-source software has democratized software development.

Clearly democratization isn’t a silver bullet for every problem.  Expertise is much more rare and valuable in some fields than others.  But if your business today is based on having a database that your staff maintains, take note!  Somebody’s probably out there right now figuring out how to build a competing business where anybody in the world can contribute to their database.  And pretty soon they’re gonna be taking pot-shots at your market.  Managing user-generated content is really hard.  Counting votes is really hard.  But if it’s done well, it will dominate any system based on central editorial control.  With the help of computers, groups of people can solve problems far more effectively than individuals can.  This truth will not change.

(I brought this idea up at the Decibel Festival talking about music editorial systems and received a lot of positive feedback about it, so I wanted to post it.  But I must give credit for the vocabulary to my good friend Ramez Naam — I first heard it when he was critiquing a startup’s business model as being communist.  At first I laughed, but later I appreciated his wisdom.)

When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real "you-get-what-you-pay-for" situation here.  Premium services are highly accurate.  But free services like hostip.info are barely breaking 50% accuracy right now.  But even though it thought my IP address was in the middle of the San Francisco bay, that is at least in the correct timezone.

Hostip.info has the right goal of creating puclicly accessibly web services APIs.  In fact their API is beautiful.  So please, go contribute to their database and help improve the accuracy.  Then we’ll never need to tell the computers what timezone we’re in — they’ll just know.  And we all want the computers to get smarter, don’t we?

Hostip.info thinks you’re in this country:




Wrong?  Please correct it.

Computers are getting faster and more powerful.  As they do so, they’re helping humans be smarter.  Maybe not invidual humans, as some studies have shown that things like e-mail and powerpoint can actually make people stupider for some definition.  I can see the truth in this by considering several very smart friends of mine who don’t actually remember their spouse’s cell phone numbers.  Because they don’t need to.  Their computer familiars remember these things for them — the external brain.  In combination we get smarter — the synergy of humans and computers or groups of humans connected through computers — whatever you want to call these aggregate life-forms, they are way better at solving difficult problems than any individual human was just 15 years ago, when there was little e-mail and no Google.  In just 15 years, we’ve seen massive improvements in our ability to solve problems!

Moreover, technological change is accelerating.  These changes aren’t going to stop until we have completely overcome biology.  Unless something horrible happens.  Which it could.  To be explicit, I see humanity facing two possible futures on the multi-century timescale:

• Enlightenment by transcending the limitations of biology through technology
• A dramatic, catastrophic, probably violent and painful return to a simpler way of life

Because of this, I feel a sense of transhumanist morality obliging me to dedicate my life’s work to striving for the first option: species-wide enlightenment through technology.

I plan on writing a lot more on this topic.  But I wanted to start by stating a thesis along with a few basic ideas.