Here’s an interesting question: would you rather live 100 years in the past or 100 years in the future? There are good arguments for both sides. Let me try to make a list of advantages for each below.

The past

• Families are closer together geographically.
• Families spend more time together. No tv or video games to distract them.
• Communities are closer together.
• People aren’t as distracted or dumbed down by technology.
• Life is perhaps more of an adventure? Everything is more difficult, from keeping food safe, to traveling, etc.
• Most work is physical, working the land with your hands.

The future

• People are healthier and live longer (better healthcare).
• It’s easy to travel all around the world (or beyond it?).
• You can stay connected with people from everywhere.
• You can get information quickly and easily.
• We’ll have computer or robots that can perform lots of tasks that people do now.

Personally, I am really curious about the future, what it will be like, what we’ll be like, what technologies we’ll have, what we’ll be able to do, etc. I think the past would be neat as well, as it would be nice to have a tight-knit family and community, and I feel like it could be slightly more adventurous, as just traveling across the country would be a big deal.

This is a crazy thought, but I feel an interesting balance between these things in a few decades would be to live on Mars. It’s still the future and you get all of those things. But I also assume its a very small group, tight-knit, probably without tv and those things, and probably working the land to survive (although probably with machines). That can be another blog post: If you could move to Mars, would you? What if you could never come back?

This is going to lead directly to skynet: Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk. As the military starts writing these algorithms to try to attack other’s computer networks and infiltrate their security, and then start working on ones to defend against such attacks, and then algorithms to outsmart the defensive ones…. this could easily lead to skynet. We could have single algorithms/agents in charge of the military infrastructure and able to adapt and learn. Hopefully John Connor is out there somewhere…

Here’s a ridiculous story predicting that we’ll be marrying robots by 2050.  Not only do they predict that, but they predict that Massachusetts will be the first state to legalize it.  I certainly see the sex robots coming very soon - the sex industry always takes advantage of new technology before anyone else.  But marriage with robots?  I suppose if robots are actually intelligent by 2050 and seem like equals to humans then maybe its possible.  But if not, then its like asking if people will be marrying their cars or computers.  A little absurd, I think.

The Edge just released the answers to their annual Question of the Year.  This year the question was “What are you optimistic about?”  A bunch of the answers said they were optimistic about optimism.  And a large number of responses were people saying they were optmistic about our chances of combating/surviving global warming.  But the ones I find the most interesting are the AI and brain related ones, so I’ll highlight a few of my favorites here.

AI pioneer Marvin Minsky says he’s optimistic about our chances of developing immortality.  He suggests that we may be able to download our conciousness to a computer in the near future and thus live on forever in silicon (something I’ve mentioned before).

AI researcher Rodney Brooks is optimistic about space flight in the next century.  He thinks there will be people living on other planets in our lifetime and cites all the private space ventures that are working on their own spaceship designs right now.  He emphasizes how important colonizing other planets is to increasing our species’ long-term chances of survival.

Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen has a really interesting piece about the rise of autism and the digital age.  He suggests the rise in the rate of autism in children is not something to be pessimistic about because many of these children will be very successful in the digital age.  Autism is a disease that makes it much more difficult for children to relate to others, but perhaps easier for them to relate to a computer.

Cognitive Scientist Donald Hoffman thinks we will soon have the answer to the mind-body problem.  He thinks most of the current theories are wrong, but because of our presuppositions about the brain and this problem. He foresees a shift in these presuppositions and a breakthrough in this area coming soon.

Computational Neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski thinks there will be a breakthrough in understanding intelligence.  He thinks reinforcement learning may lead to this breakthrough as recent research suggests that dopamine in the brain may act as the reward signal in reinforcement learning.

Gloria Origgi talks about the impact of multi-linguism in Europe. Something I mentioned in my posts after reading Consciousness Explained was the effect that language has on our thinking and how it made me want to learn another language.  In Europe (and in most of the world other than the US), children are learning multiple languages all the time.  Origgis suggests this may lead to more cognitive flexibility in the children along with less intolerance in Europe.

Psychologist Sherry Turkle has some interesting thoughts on the objects that inspire young children to become scientists.  A girl braiding her doll’s hair again and again (recursion), taking apart toys and things.

Finally, artificial life researcher Steve Grand is optimistic about the strong possibility that we’ve got everything horribly wrong.  In many cases in the past, we have had things horribly wrong and then suddenly realize that all our assumptions are wrong (like believing the Earth is the center of the universe).  He suggests that two possibilities would be quantum theory and the theory of matter.  But then goes on to say that AI may be another likely one and that neuroscience has the answer (very similar to Donald Hoffman’s piece on solving the mind-body problem by fixing our presuppositions).

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.

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’ve been reading the book “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil, which Holly and Rick gave me for Christmas. It’s all about the accelerating rate of technology and what will happen when that rate approaches infinity (the singularity). This is something I discussed in one of my old rants from 2003 (Part 1, Part 2). I speculated that this infinite rate could be reached when we can manipulate and travel in time. Since an actual rate of infinity seems impossible, would we be able to differentiate between close to infinity and really really close to infinity? Would our perception of time change as technologies are developed at such an absurd rate?

In the book, Kurzweil suggests that the singularity will occur when when we develop powerful enough computers with good enough AI that they can design newer better computers. These intelligent computers would redesign themselves, continually designing better and better computers and other technology. With the computer power available increasing exponentially and the amount of money we spend on computers each year also increasing exponentially, we’ll be buying enough computing power to match all of life on Earth by the 2040’s, so this is when Kurzweil suggests the singularity will occur. We will all be augmented by computers in our brains and also have rapidly accelerating intelligence to go along with the artificially intelligent computers.

Here’s a quote from the book (p. 22):

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

~Irving John Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” 1965.

When I was visiting the University of Texas in Austin, Prof. Stone gave a software demonstration of automated cars driving through an intersection. Since they were controlled by computers and could communicate wirelessly, there was no reason for stoplights and they were all zipping through pretty fast.

It will be cool when they have automated parking lots where you can pull up to the door and your car goes off and finds a spot. Then when you check out it sends a signal to your car to come back to the door.

I also imagine that cars will no longer be restricted to the right side of the road. Depending on traffic, cars could drive on the left side of the road and easily merge back over if another car was coming. Roads could be optimized for traffic in this way. I imagine it would be like walking on a sidewalk. Other than the occasional dance step that occurs when you start walking towards someone head on, humans can share the same sidewalk going both directions pretty easily.

Imagine how crazy the “drugs” of the future will be. Instead of chemicals that slightly elevate your mood, make you relax, or give you crazy thoughts, there will drugs or electrical stimulation that directly activate those regions of the brain. They’ve done studies where they give a rat an electrical stimulus in the pleasure center of the brain when it hits a lever. The rat gets so addicted to the stimulus, it won’t even leave the lever to eat food and it eventually dies. The stimulation is more important to it than living. Obviously this could be dangerous, but it a more moderate form, there could be stimuli to provoke wild thoughts, relaxation, weird visualizations, extraordinary perceptions, etc. Should be one crazy future.

I was thinking the other day how much different kids grew up that are just 5 or 10 years younger than me. For me, computers got big in late elementary school/jr high, dial-up internet in high school, cell phones at the end of high school, and broadband internet in college. Kids now have grown up their whole lives with cell phones and broadband internet, myspace and instant messenger. They’re always connected no matter where they go. They’re never separate from their friends at night, chatting online. And they’ve grown up using these tools, which I’m sure will make them the most tech savvy generation yet.

It will be interesting to see how different this generation will be when they are graduating college and entering the work force in a few years. They should relate socially different than our generation and be much more technologically savvy.