(Photo by Nasa, uploaded on Flickr by Jurvetson. See a high resolution version too!)

The Phoenix interplanetary exploration vehicle landed on Mars. My name, David Orban, is on it, together with those of the other members* of Planetary Society. This is of course a rather indirect way of being on Mars, but for the moment I can’t do better, and it is still thrilling to feel part of humanities space exploration efforts!

The photo above is really worth seeing at high resolution: it shows the Phoenix lander descending on the surface, as seen by the Mars Orbiter flying around the planet.

*If you want your name flying into space on other vehicles, you can participate in other programs that the Planetary Society is organizing too!

I met John Nash, and his colleague Robert Aumann recently. Both won the nobel prize for economy (there isn’t one for mathematics!) for their achievements in games theory.

In our conversation I asked them one of my ‘usual’ questions about the impact of accelerating change, and the strains to which individuals and societies which adapt are exposed. It took a little prodding to let them admit that a new kind of change might indeed be happening! That not all change is equal. That the accumulation of a quantitative change can burst into a phase-changing level of qualitative change.

Here are three videos…

Conversation with John Nash

Conversation with Robert Auman

The two hour long unedited recording at a conference of the ISEO Istitute in which they tell about both their work, and their life is also available in streaming or for download.

On Feb 15 the voting for the ‘Grand Challenges For Engineering in the next 100 years‘ is going to start. This is the contribution I wrote for the discussion there:

Atomic scale assembly, and programmable matter… A better understanding of quantum mechanics, and the software capable of exploiting it will give us unparalleled power over the structure and function of the objects we build.

As we move to leverage our increasing understanding of nature’s laws on the atomic scale, and the computational power enabling more and more powerful software programs designing these atomic assemblies, we will be able to construct–actually most of the time enable to self-construct–objects on a level of effectiveness and flexibility orders of magnitude higher than today.

Since humans started manipulating stone, and mud, to shape, and build objects, and tools to build better, more functional objects, the refinement of these activities might have led us to believe that we have gotten fundamentally better, while actually a stone age clay oven and Intel’s latest chip fabrication plants are based on the same principles. This macro-level approach is not sufficient anymore to achieve our goals, and simultaneously share the world’s resources in a more equitable manner among all the peoples needing them.

Rather than assuming quantum behavior as a nuisance to shield from, we have to accept it as an intrinsic and powerful element of reality, and learn to exploit it in our designs. Once we do that, everything in engineering is going to change radically: from design, to construction, to building, to project management.

Since the consequences of this radical approach are going to be vast, and complex to anticipate, it will be crucial to analyze their impact not only from the point of view of engineering itself. We will have to be alert to the possible social consequences, and inform the political decisions that will unavoidably regulate what are permitted or desirable actions through sound scientific analysis.

The UN has started the final procedures to put to a vote in front of the General Assembly a resolution for a universal moratorium on the death penalty. While not binding, the adoption of a resolution like this would be a further step towards an understanding how civilization ought to evolve in a complex environment that ill tolerates aggression at any level and from any source. And we should better want to be part of the solution then part of the problem ourselves.

A wonderful video at TED by Steven Pinker, ‘A History Of Violence’, illustrates how fallible we are in our evaluations on how the use violence changed in our societies at all scales. Its dramatic decline is illustrated in Pinker’s talk, and should serve as a guideline to politicians as strong as Moore’s law is to engineers as they stumble towards our shared future.

Then there is Sens, which takes further steps, and boldly declares that the invention of death, attributed to that of sexual reproduction a few billion years ago, is also a mistake, which we must correct.

15.00 Jamais Cascio – The Metaverse (is being skipped?! or maybe speaking later?)
Actually looking through the Google Blogsearch links I myself provided in the previous post, I saw that Jamais has already posted the full text of his speech. I guess I will list just a few sentences here and there that strike me most. (if and when he speaks)

Marcos Guillen of Artificial Development is launching today its commercial and open source products, CCortex Spiking Neural Network Engine. AD wants to implement a complete simulation of a cortical system.

Now Jamais is going to speak. He is not using a PowerPoint presentation, which he says corrupt the mind. He is reading, quite well, the text of his speech. He is referring to the Metaverse Roadmap Overview that he authored a few months ago.
“Scenarios are not predictions, but provocations.”
“Code is inherently political.”
“It is important to democratize the Singularity”
“There will be surprising benefits from a messy open source collaboration for AGI”
“We can make the right choices. Survival is possible.”

15.50 Panel discussion
Stephen Omohundro
“Self improving AI is going to be extremely unpredictable. The previous version could itself not understand the one coming after it.
Describes Von Neumann’s theories of rational behavior.
“Programmers are devices for converting pizza into code”
“Self-improving systems are devices for converting resources into maximizing utility”
“The Four Drives: Efficiency – use recources better, Self-Preservation – keep resources, Acquisition – get more resources, Creativity – find new ways to create utility”

Peter Voss, Adaptive AI talks about “Increased Intelligence, Improved Human Life”
“AGI is almost certainly going to happen in less then ten years, and very likely in less then 5
Human level intelligence is the bottleneck for many problems that humanity faces
Through the benefits of AGI we will become more wealthy, more healthy and more moral”

Question from Brad Templeton: “Will personal AGIs will be objected to on the basis of them being slaves?” Answer is that the AGIs might not themselves object, but other humans will.

17.10 Neil Jacobstein of Teknowledge
“Many of the formerly narrow expert systems have acquired broad scope.
Myths about AI: if it works it isn’t AI; AI is all hype (but writing off AI is like writing off eCommerce after the meltdown of the end of the 90s); if it isn’t human+ level then it is not AI”
Shows statistics about IAAI – Innovative Applications for Artificial Intelligence.
Comment from a former DARPA Director: The DART scheduling application paid back all of DARPA’s 30 year investment in AI
An other application, CombineNet ASAP, has a documented cost savings of $1.8B.

17.34 Ben Goertzel of Novamente and the Singularity Institute has a new title for his speech which is “Nine years to AGI”, since a year ago he gave a speech which was entitled “Ten years to AGI”.
“Human babies are the stupidest things, but we have to start there.
The robotic approach is good, but you will loose all of your time with actuators, and servo motors. We settled on robots in virtual worlds.
Novamente is initiating an open source AGI called OpenCOG, and will present virtual pets at the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose in October.

18.00 Paul Saffo “Machines of Loving Grace: Anticipating Advanced AI”
“The press coverage of this conference is proof that the public is about to join the conversation.
But this is a moment of pessimism. The optimistic scenario is that when AGI arrives they will treat us as pets, and the pessimistic scenario is that they will treat us as food.”
He reads a poem “All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace”
We need more poets, and more novelists covering this.

Questions to Ben, Neil, and Paul. Missed many of them, because I stood up making a question/observation which went more or less the following: “Paul, your observations, and the reading of that wonderful poem make it seem that we need to build a bridge between technologists, and humanists, which organizations like Edge.org, and Third Culture are very well doing. I would posit that it is even more important to build a bridge of communication towards, between those of us who are proude of our knowledge, and those who starting from a faustian fear, and often in a position of power, are proud of their ignorance.”

We got the power supply issues solved, and the wifi is also now working well thanks to the great help from the organizers.

09.40 Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital introducing the Summit:
“The 21st Century is going to be far more greater, and/or far more terrible then the 20th Century. We are here to make sure that it is going to be greater, and not more terrible.”

09.50 Rodney Brooks, MIT speaking
“In 1783 people were not asking the right questions about the airplane industry and flight when the hot-air balloon was invented
When an AGI will be invented the world will be a very different place than today
I am a great fan on AC Clarke, and 2001 Space Odissey is one of the films that is aging better.”

10.00 “AGI and Robots are needed for demographical reasons. And there will be a lot of VC, a lot of investment to provide them.
In 2016 we will have all movies worth watching in our pockets on our iPod… so much for RIAA and DRM!
There are 5000 deployed robots in Iraq now, up from zero in all of the military in 2001. These are not prototypes”

10.10 “From 2 meters in six hours in 1979 our cars at the Stanford AI Lab now do 200 kms in 6 hours in 2005. That is the power of exponentials.”

10.15 He is depicting various scenarios for the future, each of them however including the coming of the AGI, in which he does believe. Unless “as from Tau Ceti somebody is laughing at us as if we were chipmunks not just smart enough to get there”. Laughing.

10.20 Questions from the audience. One of the non-AI specific ones:
“You said that it is the time now to ask if it is a good idea to let robots aquire autonomous firing capacity, and that there are some governments following the Geneva Convention thinking about it. Do you think it is a good idea to give AI to the United States Government military?”
Answer from Rodney:
“This is a question that scientist face since Leonardo who was completely funded by the military. Scientist must think and implement control mechanisms, but this is a question outside of AI.

10.30 Eliezer Yudkowsky, Singularity Institute speaking
“Criticism of the bold thesis of accelerating change does not necessarily touch the core of the thesis.
If you want to be smart don’t be fooled by futures with blinking lights, but concentrate on cognitive enhancements!
He is quoting Geordie Rose of D-wave on Software Progress vs. Hardware progress (1977 hardware with 2007 algorithm is better then the other way around) to show that the threshold for the Singularity event horizon can be lowered by breakthroughs!
The three schools of Singularity (Event horizon, Accelerating Change, Intelligence Explosion) do not imply each other, or require each other’s thesis, but they support each other’s cores.”
Question time, and answers…
“The most important challenge in AI today is to keep improving our understanding of how to think how to think about thinking, which we have been doing on our own in science for hundreds of years.
One billion operations per second could be enough to be the basis of an Intelligence Explosion grenade, but we would need an additional 100 years’ worth of science to be able and code it there.”

11.00 Break

11.35 Barney Pell, CEO of Powerset “Most of AI reserchers don’t do AGI because it is very hard, and also because it is difficult to get funding.
At some point better AI and AGI becomes central to the creation of better products, and that becomes a virtuous circle where more revenues lead to more funding, better AGI, better product, and so on.
Within the next five years the introduction of natural language interfaces is going to create a huge difference.” Obviously he says that, since that is what Powerset is about! A few slides present Powerset’s approach.
Question from the audience if this is going to help people learn, and the answer is a definitive yes. Conversational interfaces are going to be powerful learning tools.

12.00 Sam Adams from IBM Research “We can beat Gary Kasparov, but no computer has the common sense of a six year old child.
Joshua Blue prject to develop a computer that pass the ‘Toddler Turing Test’, stopping at age three. They can do all kind of things that traditional AI says it is incredible hard.
Implementing analogs of this approach in a computer system we learned a lot of very counterintuitive stuff. For example superstition appears to be the source of all knowledge, since all experience for the first time is without understanding. Yes, but grounded in experience.
An other is ‘aggressive forgetfulness’ where most of the sensorial input received is quickly discarded.
Superstition + Forgetfulness = General Intelligence?
For the next two years I am going to study multicore systems because we don’t know how to program them now effectively and we need them to run our algorithms closer to real time.
The pathway to AGI is in following the Child!”

12.30 Wendell Wallach, Yale “In our current computational theories of the brain we take into consideration neurons and synapses. What role do other elements of the brain play, like glial cells, microtubules, variations of the neurons, etc.?
As Michelson was wrong in saying in 1894 about physics that “it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established” we could be missing pieces that make our science of the brain inadequate.
If we want to approach machine consciusness, we need to better define the phenomenal experience.
We are just a few years away from a major catastrophy caused by autonomous computers systems making a wrong decision. That will precipitate the discussion on machine morality.
Artificial Moral Agents are necessary.
How can we make ethics computable?”
Great quote from the audience during questions: “Bureaucracy is our way of getting untrustworthy agents to be trusted. Are we going to corrupt our Moral Agents if we apply this trick to them?”

13.10 Panel discussion and question session
“Should we give these machines rights?”
Barney Pell answers “Robots will ahve rights when robots will claim rights. Today we are hypocritical about these issues, when we eat animals, etc.”

13.30 Lunch break

Here are more people liveblogging the Singularity Summit and photos of Flickr

Dan Farber’s blog Between The Lines, covers the Singularity Summit, is being updated frequently with great posts, and it doesn’t show up in the previous query since it doesn’t use the word ‘liveblogging’.

15.00 Continuing for the afternoon the live blogging of the Singularity Summit on a separate entry.

This spring I joined the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). After having followed Ray Kurzweil‘s, Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s, and Ben Goertzel‘s work for some time, it is my opinion that the institute that they are directing, together with Tyler Emerson, Bruce Klein, and others, is one of the most important today, and for the next few decades, for the future of humankind.

With three kids, and a keen understanding of the perils of modern society, our growing powers, and the responsibilities that come with them, it is for me rather natural to seek out the organization that can create the highest possible impact in what I deem a positive direction. Shaping the future is a privilege that we know to have since Illuminism. We have an understanding that the accumulation of our knowledge, tools, and the way we apply them define not only how we live, but also how future generations will live. It is not a coincidence that this has developed so profoundly in the last three centuries, but that is for an other post.

SIAI believes that human intelligence is just one in a vast space of possible other intelligences, and that humanity is on the verge of being joined by its own creations among the active agents that shape the planet’s future. We can stumble into this future blindly, where the speed of change is going to be further increased, and the complexity of events compounded by the intentions of the multiplicity of other players. Or we can try to map it out, and even better, plan for it, or in the best possible scenarios, craft the seeds of the intelligences that are going to soon join us in a way that the probabilities of a peaceful coexistence with them are maximized.

Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) are going to be as different from us and from each other, as the body plans of the crazy forms emerging from the cambrian explosion, and many of their concerns and aims are not going to be shared by us. For a while however we will definitely share the planet, and we already realize how fragile are its environment, and resources, to leave them unmanaged, and unattended.

On Monday I am leaving for the US, where I will end my trip with the Singularity Summit in San Francisco:

The Singularity Summit to address promise and peril of advanced AI to future of humanity

What are the major challenges to achieving advanced AI? What are the benefits and dangers? How far are we from self-improving AI? How should we prepare for this potentially powerful innovation?

These are among the questions that 17 outstanding thinkers will explore and debate at the Singularity Summit, to be held Saturday and Sunday, September 8-9, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California. The summit is organized by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit institute in Silicon Valley for the study of safe advanced AI.

“Advanced AI has the potential to impact every aspect of human life. We are in a crucial window of opportunity where we have temporary but powerful leverage to influence the outcome,” said Tyler Emerson, chair of the summit and executive director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “Only a small group of scientists are aware of the central issues. It is essential to expand discussion of this critical 21st century issue, which is why I have created the summit.”

Peter Thiel, PayPal Cofounder, Clarium Capital President, and Facebook’s initial investor, will MC the summit and present his new ideas on financial markets and the Singularity. “It’s clear that the term ‘AI’ means a lot of different things,” said Thiel. “It’s one of these terms that has been bandied about a great deal, and has been misused a lot. It has been predicted for a long time that AI is right around the corner, and it’s taking longer than many people thought it would, with many disappointments along the way. However, it’s clear that there’s a massive set of issues happening, and people who don’t think there’s something important going on are living in a fantasy, and need to wake up.”

Confirmed Summit speakers include:

• Dr. Rodney Brooks, famous MIT roboticist and founder of iRobot
• Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research at Google
• Paul Saffo, Stanford, leading technology forecaster
• Sam Adams, distinguished engineer within IBM’s Research Division
• Jamais Cascio, cofounder of World Changing and creator of Open the Future
• Dr. Ben Goertzel, director of research at SIAI and founder of Novamente
• Dr. J. Storrs Hall, author of Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine
• Dr. Charles L. Harper, Jr., senior VP at John Templeton Foundation
• Dr. James Hughes, executive director of Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
• Neil Jacobstein, prominent AI expert and CEO of Teknowledge
• Dr. Stephen Omohundro, founder of Self-Aware Systems
• Dr. Barney Pell, founder and CEO of Powerset
• Christine Peterson, cofounder of Foresight Nanotech Institute
• Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and founder of Clarium Capital
• Wendell Wallach, author of Machine Morality: From Aristotle to Asimov and Beyond
• Eliezer Yudkowsky, Friendly AI pioneer and cofounder of SIAI
• Peter Voss, founder and CEO of Adaptive Artificial Intelligence

“To any thoughtful person, the Singularity idea, even if it seems wild, raises a gigantic, swirling cloud of profound and vital questions about humanity and the powerful technologies it is producing,” said Douglas R. Hofstadter at last year’s Singularity Summit at Stanford, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. “Given this mysterious and rapidly approaching cloud, there can be no doubt that the time has come for the scientific and technological community to seriously try to figure out what is on humanity’s collective horizon. Not to do so would be hugely irresponsible.”

I will try to liveblog and twitter from the summit, wifi connections permitting…

For hundreds of years science progressed, and physics was one of the main sciences following the method that having experiments and theories going hand in hand, could offer new and exciting interpretations for the worlds phenomena. This mechanism, giving the foundations of our agricultural, technological, and medical progress, has at least partially gotten stuck thirty years ago. In the eighties, when the next step along the lines of explanations for the way the universe works seemed right behind the corner, the main candidate was string theory. It promised to be able and unify the quantum level of explanations of the phenomena at the smallest of scales, with general relativity, and gravity, at the largest scales of the universe. As years passed without the promised breakthrough, it became clear to some, as many were sucked into the well oiled process of how academic science works today with fad- and authority-based financing, that string theory ran the risk of diluting the power of the scientific method itself, by operating contrary to all previous steps: it could find a theory that could match any given set of data!

In his book The Trouble With Physics, Lee Smolin offers an alternative view* of not only his own theories, but also suggests important changes in the mechanisms of how official science allocates resources today, to help explore as many as possible of the different ideas.

These days there have been new developments in the field, with the progressive release of experimental data from the US accelerator (and a lot of apprehension in Europe because of a further delay in the coming online of the latest accelerator there). There are some indications that could lead to the identification of a new particle, called Higgs, that is at the basis of the origin of mass. This would not verify or falsify string theory itself, which is too slick to be so easily cornered, but will nonetheless represent a step in the right direction.

I am especially pleased that my physicist friend Tommaso Dorigo, whose blog is discussing the US results, is receiving coverage in the New York Times, in a clear and correct article about this subject.

*Larry Lessig told me that he would bring this book, with others, to his summer retreat after I recommended it to him. What I told him is that the switches in the points of view in search of the fundamentals that the various unifications of physical theories required are very similar, in my mind, to looking from law to politics, in search of fundamentals. Both law and politics are at the foundation of human societies, and their interactions define the way society benefits its members.

I have been using (and selling) Dragon NaturallySpeaking for the last ten years, and love it. It has become exceptionally accurate and responsive in its various revisions, especially now, that it can swallow all the hardware power we can throw at it. However, current dictation software is only useful if you can’t use the computer otherwise with the keyboard and the mouse, or if you do have at least a page’s worth of stuff to write. It is not a new interface or a new paradigm to use the computer.

There are a lot of areas where we will need to progress (and the constant increase in the average number of words used in a Google search is an interesting indication that indeed we are progressing), until computers will be able and converse with us in a useful manner. And while Dragon is a great piece of software, it is unlikely that version n+1 will be the one achieving this. A breakthrough is needed…

On the one hand we are likely to get something from Google, on the other, specialists in the field are as well important, and ready to contribute.

It is a great news that James Baker, the founder of Dragon Systems, is now creating an institute to achieve this breakthrough, with the capability of concentrating on long term goals.

Jim Baker has been appointed the Director of Research at the new Center of Excellence in Human Language Technology at the Johns Hopkins University (the Center is so new that the link actually is just a search on the JHU website, with results including a summer school, etc. But I assume that soon the first result on the link will be the Center itself. Also, Jim Baker’s homepage is on his previous post at Carnegie Mellon University, and I assume this will move soon too. I wonder what will happen to the Center for Innovations in Speech and Language Technology, and to its numerous projects. I hope they can migrate to JHU with Jim.)

I have been invited to join the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation.

The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.

It will be a great privilege to contribute with my views and input to the foundation’s goals.