Since this is related to a lot of stuff I’ve posted about on here, I figured I’d post the link.  It’s an article about spaceships being developed with artificial intelligence to remove the long delays of getting commands from people back on earth:

NYT: Intelligent Beings in Space!

An article Holly sent me a few weeks ago said that while we think of America as the land of opportunity, it actually has a much lower percentage of people who are born poor and make it rich than most of the rest of the world.  The articles interprets this to mean that it is much harder to start poor and get rich in America.  But I think all you can really interpret from this is that it doesn’t happen often.  So what are the reasons that so few people do this in America?

The article states that education is the biggest factor, with richer children getting a better education at school.  But certainly there are scholarships and financial aid available for smart kids whether they are rich or poor.  In David Brook’s column yesterday, he hypothesized that it was the skills these children aren’t taught such as self-discipline and motivation that makes a difference.  Supposedly children who develop learning skills by age 3 will be better learners throughout the rest of their life.  So perhaps it is a difference in the way these children are raised in the first three years of their life?

There aren’t any obvious answers here.  Certainly a good education is expensive and out of reach for some people and needs to be made more accessible.  But I do also agree with the concept of children learning these skills early in their life.  The first few years of a student’s life will determine their motivation, self-discipline, and hunger to learn which will guide them through school.  Of course, rich children can learn none of those things and still stay rich.  So certainly it is harder for poorer familes.

The speaker at the class day for Holly’s engineering school last week told them how their education was only half-done and that it was important to find a good first job with someone who would mentor them.  Here are graduates of an Columbia University, an Ivy League school, and they graduate with only half an education!!  It made me realize just how good the co-op program really is.  You do need to get that work experience and understanding .  And it really is helpful to do it while you’re still taking classes because understanding how things you learn in the classroom are applied in real work really impacts what you take from future classes.  In addition to the fact that you can try out different jobs, different companies, understand different workplace dynamics, and have a few job offers waiting for you when you graduate.

Since the government has a lot more vehicles and uses a lot more gasoline and power than most other companies or entities, they should be the ones to kick-start the development of greener technologies for power and cars. If the government required all their agencies to only buy hybrid cars, the cost of hybrid cars would go down significantly and more people would be able to buy them. And as K. R. Sridhar said in Thomas Friedman’s column today,

Second, the government should set high goals for mileage and CO2 emissions for its own vehicle fleet, as well as high goals for eco-friendly, low-energy electricity generation for every government building — and then promise to be the first customer for whatever company reaches those high goals.

“The federal government is the single largest consumer of energy in the country,” Mr. Sridhar said. “It’s time for the government to lead by example and flex a little consumer muscle. It’s time for government to use its buying power when buying power.”

This seems like a really good way for the government to encourage the innovation of greener technologies while driving the prices down for others.  And it is probably more effective than imposing costly regulations on industry and making them pay for it first.  Certainly the government should start obeying the rules first before imposing them on others.

With the rapid acceleration of technology, we should be able to travel to other stars in our galaxy within the next few centuries (conservatively). If there are alien civilizations out there, certainly some should be more than a few centuries ahead of us in developing. So the question is, why haven’t we seen or heard from any of them? I believe there are three possible explanations:

• There are no other intelligent beings out there.
• There are some intelligent beings but the speed of light has limited them from reaching us yet.
• There are intelligent beings and they are keeping themselves hidden from us for some reason.

Let’s look at each of these possibilities:

There are no other intelligent beings out there. The Drake equation attempts to determine the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe from the rate of star formation * fraction of stars that have planets * number of planets that are habitable per planet bearing star * fraction of these that develop life * fraction of life that becomes intelligent * fraction of which are willing and able to communicate * expected lifetime of such a civilization. The first few variables in this equation are known and there are likely billions of planets in the universe. The question is, how many are habitable, how frequently does life form, and how frequently does it become intelligent. Perhaps the collision that created our abnormally large moon (which creates our tides) and large tilt angle (which creates our seasons) was necessary to get life started. Maybe the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was vital for us to evolve. We are the only intelligent (speaking, tool-using, etc) beings on our planet, so perhaps intelligent life doesn’t evolve very often. If even a small fraction of the planets out there bore intelligent life then our universe would be teeming with it, and certainly we would have seen some by now.

There are some intelligent beings but the speed of light has limited them from reaching us yet. Perhaps there is some intelligent life out there but they are rare and far away. While there are some 30 billion trillion stars in the visible universe, there are only about 600 million stars within 5000 light years and 260,000 stars within 250 light years. If faster than light travel is impossible (through wormholes or any other means) then any communication or contact with another civilization would likely have to travel across space for thousands of years to reach us. So while it seems unlikely that we’re the most advanced ones out there, if we’re at least within 5,000 years then we won’t have seen anyone yet (although 5000 years is nothing on the cosmic scale either). But certainly if there was life out there that wanted to contact us and it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light, we would have seen some by now.

There are intelligent beings and they are keeping themselves hidden from us for some reason. It’s also possible that aliens are out there but are hiding themselves from us, following some “Prime Directive” like in Star Trek. It seems unlikely that every alien race would adhere to this rule if there really were that many of them out there.

So what conclusion can we come to? If there are aliens out there, either its impossible to travel faster than the speed of light or they want to remain hidden. Or perhaps the impact that created our planet and our moon, and the other circumstances surrounding our planet’s beginnings, life’s beginning on Earth, and our evolution, are so rare that we are a once-in-the-universe kind of thing.

It is so awesome to drive down one of the avenues in NYC and have all the lights turn green for you as you approach.  So much different than Boston where you expect each light to turn red as you approach.  This has to have a HUGE effect on the way people drive in these two cities.  In Boston, you’re always worried about getting stuck at a series of red lights and you cut people off and race through yellow lights to avoid it.  In NYC, all the lights turn green as you approach so you speed towards them, never stopping for pedestrians.  I would imagine that driving a lot in these two cities would affect your personality as well.  Lights turning green for you would make you much happier than lights turning red for you.

The human brain is the most intelligent thing that we know of. One of the best prospects for developing true artificial intelligence is to reverse-engineer the brain. Reverse-engineering the brain will involve imaging the brain down to every detail, modelling it, and simulating it. There is already a lot of research going on to reverse-engineer the brain from fields like neuroscience, computer science, engineering, and pyschology. We are not able to image the brain at the neuronal level of detail yet, but broad simulations of different brain regions have already been created. Understanding the brain is something scientists have worked at for a long time and we will soon be approaching a time when we can not only understand it, but replicate it.

The biggest current restriction on reverse-engineering the brain is our current imaging technology. Both the spatial and temporal resolution of our best imaging now (MRI) are not good enough to capture individual firings of individual neurons. Still, we are able to get general ideas of which groups of neurons are firing when and what they do, so that much progress has been made in simulating various brain regions. But as our imaging systems get better then we should be able to capture and record every neuronal firing in the brain and develop a complete model of its workings.

The brain is much different from a computer and building a full model of it will provide us with many benefits. The brain’s neurons fire very slowly compared to a computer, but they are huge numbers of neurons and they are all connected in a massively parallel way, providing us with great pattern recognition abilites. The brain is able to rewire itself and grow new neuronal connections to learn new skills and memories. By combining these features with the great speed and perfect memory of a computer, we will develop an incredible artificial intelligence.

There are a number of current projects going on to reverse-engineer parts of the brain. Many of the pattern recognition algorithms used in the field of artificial intelligence and data mining such as neural networks and Bayesian networks were developed from theories of how the brain worked. Researchers have developed detailed models of the cerebellum and parts of the visual cortex. Lloyd Watts at MIT has developed a model of the auditory pathway in the brain that was better at differentiating a voice from a crowd than any program written before.

Current people are working on reverse-engineering the brain from the sensory inputs inward, since the senses are something we can understand easily. As we develop accruate models of the pathways the sensory data follow, we will develop models further in the brain, where the information is combined and stored and decisions are made. Along with the rapidly improving imaging technology, a complete model of the brain will soon become reality.

A Turing machine is Alan Turing’s original model of a basic computer. A Turing machine can model any computational process. In the 1930’s, Kurt Godel proved that there were certain mathematical problems that could not be proved. Later that decade Alan Turing and Alonzo Church both published papers suggesting that certain problems were unsolvable by a Turing machine (the Church-Turing thesis). Since a Turing machine can model any computer, these problems are unsolvable by any computer. It can also be interpreted that since a Turing machine cannot solve such problems, neither can a human. Since the human brain and body follow the laws of physics and can eventually be modelled by a computer or Turing machine, the same rule must apply to them. So the question is, are there certain problems that humans cannot solve?

In “The Singularity is Near,” Ray Kurzweil argues that intelligence is more powerfult han physics.  Physicists are wondering about the big bang and worried about whether our universe will continue expanding or collapse at some point or they point out that the sun will die in a few billion years.  But Kurzweil suggests that we as a society will be so intelligent by that time that we will be able to change rules of physics and make the universe however we want and not have to worry about how it will end.

I was reading an interesting journal article the other day. In it, it was suggested that we have different conceptual models of whats going on. We fit all the sensory information we’re getting to one of these models and we can figure out what is going on. When people are in a sensory deprivation chamber or something of the likes of that, their sensory information fits multiple models and they end up picking a false one (hallucinating). Similarly with drugs that impair your senses, your mind picks a model that is not representative of what’s really happening and you hallucinate. It’s interesting to see the incredible about of sensory information you need to have a basic understanding of what’s really going on around you: huge amounts of visual information, feelings from your skin all over your body, plus hearing, smell, taste, and other things.