Science Cheerleader

I recently returned from an appearance at the Humanity Plus Summit at Harvard where visionaries spoke of a world–only 30 years from now– which will be vastly different than the one we live in today.

Well, according to a just-released Pew Research report examining the American public’s forecast for the next 40 years, Americans see great progress in our future,  but not at the rapid pace envisioned by Ray Kurzweil and other supporters of Singularity.

I pulled the following highlights but I encourage you to read the full report.

In the next 40 years….

81% of those surveyed expect that computers will be able to carry on conversations

71% believe there will be a cure for cancer

66% say that artificial arms and legs will outperform real limbs

53% envision ordinary people traveling in space

53% say there will be a major terrorist attack on the United States involving nuclear weapons

72% anticipate that the world will face a major energy crisis

41% expect Jesus Christ to return;  46% say this will definitely or probably not happen

Despite the imminent end of the space shuttle program, “Americans by and large remain optimistic that astronauts will land on Mars in the next 40 years:”
63%  say we will send a man to Mars in the next 40 years.

50% say that by 2050 there definitely or probably will be evidence that humans are not alone in the universe
“Roughly half of Americans foresee scientists bringing an animal species back from extinction through cloning (51%), while nearly as many (47%) say this will definitely or probably not take place by 2050.”

Read the full report.

Why so few posts from me lately? Truth is, I’ve been swamped. All great stuff, including a summer-long  immersion in an incubator program; some very cool upcoming Capitol Hill briefings for Discover Magazine and the National Science Foundation;  the launch of ECAST (Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology);  exciting speaking engagements; plotting of a national Emergency Response process so people with great ideas for solutions to a crisis will have an immediate and reliable place to turn where ideas will be delivered to decision-makers (more on that later); and…baseball season. I have four young kids and all of them play ball. Fun stuff!

To keep things fresh, I’ve enlisted the help of some enthusiastic writers so we can continue to deliver opportunities for you to get involved in science and science policy discussions; learn about people who are shattering stereotypes; and enjoy all science has to offer. From the simplest pleasures (like when I recently found a fly trapped in a spider’s web…I’m sure he deserved it) to mind-boggling speculations about our future (e.g. Singularity), it’s impossible to escape the influence and wonders of science.

I’d like to share with you a brief summary of SciCheer’s goals and outcomes. Feel free to use the data as you see fit. It’s becoming clearer to me that a SciCheer 2.0 might be in order. If you have thoughts on what the next generation of SciCheer should include, let me know. –Cheers!

On Sunday, the same day the New York Times featured YOUR future–aka Singularity, read on–on the cover of its business section, I was listening to the head cheerleader of all-things-Singularity, Ray Kurzweil, as he presented the future of humanity at the H+ Summit at Harvard. You might recall that we interviewed Ray on SciCheer sometime last year.

Ray and I, along with several others, were speakers at the H+ Summit, the theme of which was The Rise of the Citizen Scientist. I spoke about “citizen scientists” as I know them. (A copy of my powerpoint presentation can be found, below. I’ll post a link to the video when I have it.) As it turns out, my definition of citizen science isn’t quite the same as the who follow the Transhumanist/Singularity philosophy. While they are very interested and enthusiastic about what “our” citizen scientists are doing–and quite a visionary and friendly group of people, I might add–they are more interested in how humans can, ultimately, harness the deepest powers of technology to  “seize control of the evolutionary process” and create immortality.

I’ll do my best to explain what this means by pulling excerpts from my past interview with Ray Kurzweil:

Ray’s “short version” definition of  Singularity:  “The Singularity is a future time when the pace of technological change will be so fast and transformative that you will not be able to follow it unless you merge with the intelligent technology we are creating.”

How this work will and when: “Accessing the web from inside our brains is one good example of what we will see in about twenty years. The machine extensions to our brains will grow exponentially both in hardware and software capability. By the late 2030s, it will be the nonbiological portion of our intelligence that predominates.”

No thanks, I like things just the way they are. “First of all, it is human to change who we are. We didn’t stay on the ground, we didn’t stay on the planet, and we have not stayed with the limitations of our biology. Human life expectancy was 23 a thousand years ago. We are the only species that changes who we are and extends our reach, both physical and mental, through our tools. So it is human to change who we are. There will always be early and late adopters, but people are not going to completely dismiss these changes. How many people today complete reject medical and health technologies? When there is a therapy based on blood cells devices that overcome a particular disease, very few if any people will reject it. People put computers in their brains today if they have Parkinson’s Disease. People do not reject this FDA approved therapy due to philosophical issues.”

The buzz kill: real concerns that microscopic robots will pose a threat to the world: “Yes, that is called the grey goo scenario, and the narrative thread in the movie illustrates this danger. I do think we can manage that through a combination of ethical standards to build in safeguards into nanotechnology, as well as a rapid response system that detects threats and immediately deals with them, just like our biological immune system is designed to do. But this is not something we should be sanguine about. We need to be very diligent about it.”

So, there’s your future. Want to have a say? First step, head over to the beta website of ECAST (Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology) and sign up so we can keep you apprised of so-called “participatory” opportunities. We (see below) set up ECAST precisely so the public and scientists can inform each other on emerging technologies so smart, representative policies are initiated. And, as stated before: government policymakers, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and citizens need such analysis to capably navigate the technology-intensive world in which we now live.

“We”=Science Cheerleader, Arizona State University, Boston Museum of Science, the Loka Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.

Now, more than ever, we need to get in front of emerging technologies to help shape our future.

As promised, here’s a copy of my presentation.

Thanks, Mike Treder, for sharing this. Mike’s the managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. I’m a big fan of Mike’s writings, although some may think we are not of the same species. Almost everything about us can be described as polar opposite. He’s even a damn Yankees fan! But we do share our zest for opening doors to public participation, particularly in matters of technology policy.

Mike will be speaking at an upcoming seminar titled Biopolitics of Popular Culture, as will David Brin (author of The Postman) who wrote this piece for SciCheer last year.

If you register TODAY, you can cash in on the early bird discount.

Here’s the program description I copied from IEET’s website:

Popular culture is full of tropes and cliches that shape our debates about emerging technologies. Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.

Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? [Note from SciCheer: See interview with Ray Kurzweil for nonfiction example of someone who wants to live a much longer than normal life.]  What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?

Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?

During this day long seminar we will engage with culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television.

Kurzweil answered plenty-o-questions from Science Cheerleader subscribers, here, last month.  This video series is very engaging.

(Transcendent Man, a documentary on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, will premiere on April 25 in NYC. Learn when and where tickets are available, here.)

I first met Ray when I was about 24 yrs old, working at Discover Magazine (then owned by Disney). He patiently talked me through the tech behind his outrageously cool Kurzweil Keyboard and we set forth to put it on display at Disney’s Epcot.  Here we are today, five years later (give or take 10 yrs). I asked Ray to field questions from Science Cheerleader subscribers, and Bart’s readers, regarding his wildly controversial Singularity predictions. And now for the answers to the questions you posed to Ray right here. (Thanks, Ray!).

Darlene,

Here are my responses. Please confirm receipt and indicate if this meets your needs. These were good questions which I enjoyed answering.

Best, Ray (more…)

A couple of days ago, I invited readers to submit questions they’d like Ray Kurzweil to answer. The Science Cheerleader and Bartacus will be interviewing Ray Kurzweil (Artificial Intelligence expert; king of the Singularity effort)  in the coming weeks. Details are here.  As a reminder, the deadline to submit questions is midnight, Monday 2/16. 

Here are some terrific questions from Science Cheerleader readers:

Jon: Singularity University is clearly aimed at helping to shape the Singularity and hasten its arrival. Do exponential trends really need help and, if so, can we really expect to shape them?

Paul: 1) What is/will be the relationship between ethics and The Singularity? The rapid growth of science/knowledge leads to many advancements via engineering, but how can/will ethics be applied when mankind can no longer keep pace. Or will this be a problem?    2) What to do about scientific literacy so that everyone can understand, to at least a basic level, the rapidly advancing technology?

Corey:
Given the slow and erratic progress in AI over the past 40 years, what makes Kurzweil so confident that machines will become intelligent (in the commonly understood sense) in the next 40?    Or perhaps I should ask the flip side of the question: Suppose that things continue in much the way they are now, with increasingly powerful and miniaturized wireless devices making information available wherever we want it. Does that count as a “singularity”? It is easy for me to imagine, for instance, a brain implant that allows me to conduct Google searches purely by the power of thought–but that merging of biological and digital intelligence seems distinctly different from what Kurzweil means by singularity.

What Would You Ask Ray Kurzweil

For those of you who already know who Kurzweil is and what this is about, Bart of Rhetoric and Rockets and I have the opportunity to do an email interview with him and write an article right here on ScienceCheerleader.com.

If you have a question you’re dying to ask about The Singularity, send it in and we will include it in the list for consideration. We’ll keep his open until Monday 2/16 midnight ET.

For those of you who have no idea who Ray Kurzweil is or what this is about, kindly continue reading below. RK’s most famous book, “The Singularity is Near,” talks about a fundamental transformation that is occurring in the world’s technology–not just computers, but also nanotechnology (manufacturing things at the atomic level) and biotechnology (changing the human genome to overcome illness, disease, or defects).

RK proceeds from the idea that computers have been making massive improvements in processing speed and capability every couple years. The basic theory governing this advance is Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit has been increasing by an order of magnitude once every two years. This is how you get computers with ten times the speed for the same amount of money. RK says that this ability to compute is allowing us to also better understand everything faster, from the human genome to climate modeling to the human bloodstream. Eventually, around 2045 or so, the world’s computers will achieve a point where they become not only superfast, but superintelligent–faster than us and smarter. This condition, called the Singularity, will enable us to do anything from extending life more or less indefinitely, accurately predict the weather a year out, or “upload” the contents of our minds into the internet–allowing our souls to more or less become “ghosts in the machine.”

Kurzweil has even partnered with NASA and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation to create a “Singularity University” to help technical, business, and political leaders understand and cope with the changes the Singularity will bring. There are more links below. I’m sure all sorts of questions can come to mind. We’ve got ours, what are yours?

http://sciencecheerleader.com/2008/11/the_next_big_future/

http://singularity.com/
http://singularityu.org/
http://bartacus.blogspot.com/2007/11/review-of-singularity-is-near-review-is.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Imagine a world with no shortage of water, food, medical care and energy.

The Next Big Future reports this can happen when Singularity is achieved as early as the year 2029!

Singularity refers to a point in time when artificial intelligence (computers) catch up to be as intelligent as humans, then quickly outpace us, drastically altering the course of mankind.

Last week, the Singularity Summit 2008 (”the premier dialog on the Singularity”) took place in San Jose, California. Futurists got together to share data as well as concerns. And there are plenty of concerns. From the event website:

While some regard the Singularity as a positive event and work to hasten its arrival, others view the Singularity as dangerous, undesirable, or unlikely. The most practical means for initiating the Singularity are debated, as are how, or whether, it can be influenced or avoided if dangerous.

“As scientists we should also be saying ‘What are we working on? A force for good or bad?’ And responsibly consider societal impacts,” said Peter Norvig, Google Director of Research and a Summit participant.

Summit presenter, James Miller, associate professor of economics at Smith College said the mere belief that Singularity will be achieved soon, may lead to more cryonics (freezing the body so it might me resuscitated in the future).  “As more people think that future could be a vastly different placed shaped by technological advances, they are more likely to spend what it takes to be a part of it.”

Yikes!

Find out what’s already in the works to make this mind-blowing vision a reality and weigh in on the HUGE societal impacts, like Science Cheerleader subscriber Bart did on his blog.