Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: singularity – Page 82

We don’t live in a world that’s pinning the survival of humanity of Matthew McConaughey’s shoulders, but if it turns out the plot of the 2014 film Interstellar is true, then we live in a world with at least five dimensions. And that would mean that a ring-shaped black hole would, as scientists recently demonstrated, “break down” Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (And to think, the man was just coming off a phenomenal week.)

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the UK simulated a black hole in a “5-D” universe shaped like a thin ring (which were first posited by theoretical physicists in 2002). In this universe, the black hole would bulge strangely, with stringy connections that become thinner as time passes. Eventually, those strings pinch off like budding bacteria or water drops off a stream and form miniature black holes of their own.

This is wicked weird stuff, but we haven’t even touched on the most bizarre part. A black hole like this leads to what physicists call a “naked singularity,” where the equations that support general relativity — a foundational block of modern physics — stop making sense.

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If you have money in the stock market, I highly recommend that you buy as many shares of Alphabet, as much as you can, as soon as you can. Alphabet was spun out of it’s parent company, Google. It’s important, critical even, to take notice of the fact that all of Google’s “moon shot” R&D programs, from it’s X division to it’s marketing department, have been transferred to this new company. Why does this matter so very much? The answer to that question is this: The evolutionary scientific and engineering breakthroughs are nearing completion. When that happens, in the very near future, it is going to leave humanity in a state of stunned awe.

Welcome to the singularity, my friends.

Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, rose nearly 4% Tuesday morning thanks to its strong earnings report.

As a result, Alphabet (GOOGL, Tech30) started the day with a market valuation of about $551 billion. Apple’s (AAPL, Tech30) stock fell 1%, pushing its market value down to $531 billion.

Alphabet — can I just call it Google in the way the Arsenio Hall barber character in “Coming To America” refused to refer to Cassius Clay as Muhammad Ali? — wowed Wall Street with its fourth quarter results after the closing bell Monday.

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Amazing.

The Singularity isn’t NEAR…

It’s in progress.

For the first time ever, researchers have successfully demonstrated a system that enables a person to move the individual fingers of a prosthetic hand using just their thoughts.

To test the device, scientists at Johns Hopkins University recruited the help of an epilepsy patient who was preparing for surgery to pinpoint the source of his seizures. (The patient himself was not missing a limb.) The scientists used the same electrode array implanted in his brain to control the prosthetic limb. After mapping the parts of the brain responsible for individual finger control movements, the researchers programmed the prosthesis to move the corresponding finger. The details of the experiment can now be found in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

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Over the last few years tech companies both large and small have developed programs that can “dream”; and understand and process information; and even write articles; but nothing has come close to the holy grail of artificial intelligence — developing software that can learn independently.

At least, not until now.

Helsinki might seem like an unlikely potential birthplace for this new era of intelligent machines. Yet it’s there — on a side street blocks from the central train station — that a team of roboticists, neuroscientists, and graphics programmers planted the seed that would become the new artificial intelligence software developer, The Curious AI Company.

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“We will find new things everywhere we look.” –Hunter S. Thompson

At the rate of 21st century technological innovation, each year brings new breakthroughs across industries. Advances in quantum computers, human genome sequencing for under $1,000, lab-grown meat, harnessing our body’s microbes as drugs, and bionic eye implants that give vision to the blind —the list is long.

As new technologies push the boundaries of their respective industries, fields are now maturing, growing, and colliding with one another. This cross-pollination of ideas across industries and countries has changed the world—and will continue to—and it’s one of the reasons Singularity University exists.

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HRP Area of Study: Environment | NASA

The Rise of the Rest and Mars Colonization
The Chinese word for crisis has two characters (危機). The first character represents danger and the second can be interpreted as opportunity, change of time, moment or chance. Even though the meaning of these Chinese characters can vary according to the context and nearby characters, the understanding of crisis (危機) as danger (危) plus opportunity (機) can help us think about the challenges faced by humanity in 2030.

In the coming years, China will have the largest economy of the planet, dethroning the USA to number two, both economically and scientifically. India will also be catching up fast as the third largest economy in the world, and its population will continue increasing after overtaking that of China in 2025. The re-emergence of Asia, as represented by China and India, will create a dramatic shift in power and geopolitics from what has been called the West to the East. The international hegemony enjoyed by the West during the last half millennium will move back to the East, which already led the world in many areas before the European Renaissance.

Fortunately, during the next two decades, the world economy will keep expanding and human conditions will get better throughout the whole planet. Indeed, a rising tide lifts all boats. Poverty will be substantially reduced and the environment will be significantly improved thanks to a growing global conscience and continuous advances in technology. Even Africa, the historic cradle of civilization, but considered a basket case during the last few centuries, will experience its own re-emergence in the world stage. After experiencing growth of 5% during the 2010s, and even higher during the 2020s, most African countries will be joining the rapid development of China and India, like most of the rest of the world.

The world in 2030 will be radically different from the world today. Rapid economic growth and convergence will have lifted the conditions of the bottom of the pyramid, and many people will raise their eyes into outer space. The colonization of Mars will start during the 2020s according to different plans by many governments (like those of China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia, and the USA) and even some private enterprises (for example, MarsOne, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic).

Exponential Technologies and Immortality
Change is not constant, in fact, change is accelerating very fast. We will see more transformations in the next 20 years than in the past 200 years. Some technologies are radically changing humanity, in general, and also changing human beings, in particular. Many experts now talk about the four sciences and technologies of the future: NBIC (nano-bio-info-cogno). The NBIC fields are converging at an accelerating rate and they will help to transcend many human limitations in order to improve lives all around the world, and eventually beyond our tiny planet.

We might think of nano and bio as the hardware of life, and info and cogno as the software of life. In the next two decades, we will be able to replicate and improve the complexity of both the hardware and software of human beings. The complexity of our hardware is embodied in the human genome and its 3 gigabits of data, while the complexity of our software is implied by the human brain and its 1017 operations per second.

According to some technology trends, we might achieve physical immortality by copying, reproducing, augmenting, and enhancing our current hardware and software. In medicine, some scientists say that aging is actually a disease, but a curable disease. In fact, some cells do not age, for example, bacteria, germinal cells, stem cells, and cancer cells do not go through the aging process. It is fundamental to understand why this happens and use that knowledge to stop aging in more complex organisms like us. By so doing, our hardware might live indefinitely thanks to longevity discoveries related to genetic treatments, regenerative medicine, and stem cell therapies, for example.

We might also reach immortality through backing up our software. Thanks to research like the Human Brain Project in Europe and the BRAIN Initiative in the USA, we will be able to reengineer our brains. As computer-to-brain interfaces keep improving, some scientists believe that we will eventually be able to upload our brains into machines. In the next two decades, we might well see the “death of death”.

Humanity is fast approaching what some people call the “Singularity”: the moment when artificial intelligence will reach human intelligence levels, and then quickly overtake it. Perhaps then some humans might become transhumans and posthumans, changing forever life on Earth and the universe.

José Luis Cordeiro, MBA, PhD (www.cordeiro.org)

Visiting Research Fellow, IDE-JETRO, Tokyo, Japan (www.ide.go.jp)
Director, The Millennium Project, Venezuela Node (www.Millennium-Project.org)
Adjunct Professor, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia (www.mipt.ru)
Founder and President Emeritus, World Future Society, Venezuela Chapter (www.FuturoVenezuela.net)
Founding Energy Advisor/Faculty, Singularity University, NASA Research Park, California, USA (www.SingularityU.org)

Brand’s view and concerns about hacking driverless cars are valid. And, I do believe in time that government will eventually catch up in passing some laws that will make companies ensure that their technology is safe for consumer usage and are safe for the public. I just hope that the pendulum does swing too far to the other side of over regulation.

It is not easy to slot Brad Templeton. What do you make of a person who is not only the networks and computing chair at Singularity University in Silicon Valley but also a software architect, a director of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, board member of the cyberspace watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation, the first person to have set up an Internet-based business, a futurist lecturer, hobby photographer, artist, as well as a consultant on Google’s driverless car design team?

In a phone interview from the US, Templeton, who will be in India this month as a key speaker during the SingularityU India Summit (to be held in association with INK, which hosts events like INKtalks—a platform for the exchange of cutting-edge ideas and inspiring stories), shared his views on driverless cars, the perceived threat from intelligent machines and censorship of the Internet. Edited excerpts:

Driverless cars are not hacker-proof and may find it difficult to navigate chaotic traffic. How are we addressing such issues?

It’s absolutely true that people are concerned about security of these cars, but it is wrong to presume that people in the media learnt about this before those who built the driverless car. The people who built the car are working to make the car secure. They won’t be able to do it perfectly, but they are going to get there. The Google team certainly has the most miles to its credit. Right now over 2 million km in automatic mode, driving around mostly in California. The chaotic driving in India is slower than some of the roads in Europe or North America. And it is actually easier to do slower and chaotic driving than faster. You get more time to stop, perceive the situation and make accurate moves. The real challenge is that in many chaotic driving situations, there are unwritten rules so you have to figure out how to sort of, play a game with the other cars. It may mean that some of the more chaotic places may have to clean up their act a bit if they want to have a technology like this.

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At Singularity University, space is one of our Global Grand Challenges (GGCs). The GGCs are defined as billion-person problems. They include, for example, water, food, and energy and serve as targets for the innovation and technologies that can make the world a better place.

You might be thinking: We have enough challenges here on Earth—why include space?

We depend on space for telecommunications, conduct key scientific research there, and hope to someday find answers to existential questions like, “Are we alone in the universe?”. More practically, raw materials are abundant beyond Earth, and human exploration and colonization of the Solar System may be a little like buying a species-wide insurance policy against disaster.

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