The idea of cryonics, in brief, is that a person whose deteriorating bodily condition (due to illness or aging) cannot be helped by contemporary medical procedures is put in deep-freeze until later (about 2030-2050), when molecular nanotechnology allows the atom-by-atom repair of both the deadly condition and the freezing damage. Former director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, Dr. Ralph Merkle has an extensive page on cryonics, and sums up the idea this way:
"1. The purpose of cryonics is to save lives and restore health.
2. Today's medical technology can't always keep us alive, let alone healthy.
3. A future medical technology based on a mature nanotechnology should be able to preserve life and restore health in all but the most extreme circumstances.
4. Tissue preserved at the temperature of liquid nitrogen does not deteriorate, even after centuries of storage.
5. Therefore, if current medical technology can't keep us alive we can instead choose to be preserved in liquid nitrogen, with the expectation that future medical technology should be able to both reverse any cryopreservation injury and restore good health."
This then, is what Ms. Hilton signed up for, making her smarter than, like, almost everybody else. She is most definitely smarter than most reports on her signup, which attempt to make fun of her -- out of ignorance. One says: "What if she lives till she's 112 and dies of old age? We can't really see that ever being medically reversible." Well, I would recommend these:
Dr. Aubrey de Grey: Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime book (Amazon link)
And this video:
Aubrey de Grey: Prospects for extending healthy life - a lot (61 min) [Google TechTalks]
(particularly notable is the concept of "longevity escape velocity")
The Universe. When I was a kid of 7-14 years old, my family would spend several weeks at the weekend house (the "telek") during the hot summers in the village of Őrbottyán... with cousins, grandparents... it was a time away from the normal world: no school and all free time. I've read books, we discovered the woods, we stared at the night sky away from city lights with the Milky Way stretching all across the sky dome overhead... and I daydreamed: about how the Universe works, about life on Earth, about life out there in the Universe, about how our mind works.
Evolution. I had this illustrated book about the Universe, the stars, astronomy and geology, called "Sky and Earth"; and a similar one about how the world works at the physics level, from gravity to nuclear fusion, called "Mysterious World". I had the illustrated books "Life Before Man" about the history of all the various life forms on the pre-human Earth; and "The Dawn of Man" about the evolution of the human race, both with fantastic paintings by Zdenek Burian. I saw the movie Short Circuit, where an industrial robot comes alive... and when I later heard the term "kitchen robot" in a store, I wondered how it can move over door-steps when serving up coffee.
AI. As a kid, it was evident that the Universe was born in a Big Bang, the Solar System and Earth took a while to form, then biological life emerged, and evolution lead to the emergence of the intelligent human species. As a kid, it seemed obvious that this stream of emerging organized forms can continue: that it is possible to create intelligent machines that have as good and even better minds than humans, and that can overcome physical human limitations as a result of their engineered origin. As I learned, such machines were not created yet.
Death. I used to have a hamster, who died of old age after several years, when I was 12. As a kid, dying seemed unreasonable and stupid. As a kid, I pledged to defeat death: to help my relatives stay alive by finding out how to transition a human mind to a more durable machine brain. (Today, I would call this uploading, which at the time seemed easier than messy cyborgization.) Since this January, I have no more grandparents left alive.
Singularity. I strongly believed in the possibility to create machines with superhuman mental and physical capabilities. But is there some proof that this is really possible...? I also strongly believed that life on Earth is not unique in the Universe. But then, why aren't aliens from more advanced civilizations here already? I came to the conclusion that our lack of contact with aliens is proof that alien civilizations have been able to transcend their biological limitations... to the degree that we are no longer able to even detect them by physical measurements. Humans have mastered spaceflight, and are practically on the verge of explosion into the Milky Way galaxy... yet we have not observed this with alien civilizations, which can only mean that this expansion has systematically taken a form different from how we would imagine colonization with humans... it can only mean that the time window from the first spaceflight to the transcendence of physical limitations is small in all civilizations: a hundred, maybe 50 years... we're talking 2010-2060 for humanity. And since there are absolutely no signs of alien civilizations, this transition must be so fundamentally unstoppable everywhere in the Universe, almost necessary by law, that it is also bound to happen on Earth. And the vehicle of transition must be some form of artificial intelligence.
MIT. I started learning about AI through the then-new Internet. I read about the Loebner Prize; I looked at speech research and found out about Fourier-transforms; I downloaded Lisp; I read writings by Marvin Minsky. I wanted to go to MIT to learn AI. On New Year's Day of 1999, I sent an email to Minsky, asking for his insights on why "conventional AI" has still failed to produce intelligent machines, more than 40 years after the 1956 Dartmouth conference... when such machines should clearly be possible. He never wrote back. I disagreed with John McCarthy's approach: symbols, logic and formalism seemed to be very unintelligent, and a mistaken approach towards intelligence.
Mind. Since AI as such seemed to be in a dead end, I wanted to learn more about how the mind does this "intelligence thing": I would read pretty much anything I could get my hands on, that talked about the brain. I've read William Calvin's "How Brains Think", and I thought his ideas of cortical column firing patterns were right on. In the last year of high school I read Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams"; "The Extended Phenotype" from Richard Dawkins; "Evolutionary Systems - The General Theory of Evolution" from humanethologist Vilmos Csányi; and many articles from Edge.org. In 2001, I've read Bart Kosko's book about fuzzy logic... I even read Fay Zadeh's "My Life and Travels with the Father of Fuzzy Logic" to learn about the "researcher lifestyle". I took a Neural Networks course. I tried exloring alternative approaches: I took a Computational Neuroscience course and learned about the SPIKE, Neuron and GENESIS neural simulators. After much consideration, I decided not to go to the "Intelligent Systems" specialization at Budapest U: I felt that I would not be able to contribute to the academic field. My first semester at Georgia Tech brought out my interests again, and I decided that being at a US university, I might as well take AI courses: Computer Vision, Natural Language Understanding, Ubiquitous Computing; but again, I felt I would not be able to contribute in the existing framework (ie. do acceptable research). When applying to PhD, it again took me much debating with myself to conclude not to apply to any AI programs or groups. But this past semester, I again couldn't resist: I took Machine Learning; only to conclude again that this must remain a hobby for me.
Nanotech. After reading much sci-fi (notably, issues of Galaktika from the late 70s), as a kid of about 14, I daydreamed that teleportation and the instantaneous creation of objects would be possible if objects could be analyzed at the atomic level, and then recomposed at a different location atom by atom. A mental experiment was: what would happen if you made an exact copy of a person this way? And what if after analyzing the person's biological body, you would functionally recompose him in an artificial mind and body? In the last year of high school, I read Simonyi's 500-page "Cultural History of Physics", Heisenberg's "The Part and The Whole", and several books from Stephen Hawking around this time. In the spring of 2001, I found and started reading the Big Thinkers on KurzweilAI.net. I've learned about nanotechnology and the MNT (molecular nanotech) assembler from Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" and Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Intelligent Machines". Between two swims and while sunbathing in Croatia in the summer of 2001, I debated with myself, whether instead of AI (as I previously thought), maybe nanotech was the force behind the transformation of alien civilizations, that prevent us from detecting their presence in the Universe. I came to the conclusion that it must be the interplay of both: increasing levels of intelligence designing and directing nanotech manufacturing processes; and nano-engineered machines and tools contributing to the increased speed of machine computation and the exploration of biological intelligence. In 2003, I even went to France to take a nanotech course.
Some non-fiction Budapest U era readings:
Bart Kosko: "Fuzzy Thinking - The New Science of Fuzzy Logic"
Fay Zadeh: "My Life and Travels with the Father of Fuzzy Logic"
Cryonics. In December of 2000, I found out about extropians and transhumanists from the web, and for the first time, I learned that I'm not alone in the world with these weird thoughts that the human style of intelligence could be engineered to something better, or that death is a stupid thing. I've learned about Max More, Natasha Vita-More, FM 2030, the Extropy Institute, Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Singularity Institute. I've learned about Zyvex, Ralph Merkle and the Foresight Nanotech Institute. I've learned about cryonics, the Cryonics Institute, Alcor, virtification, full-body and head-only cryonic suspension. I've read Robert Ettinger's "Prospect of Immortality" and "Man Into Superman".
Claudia Mitchell's "Proto 1" prosthetic arm in action (3 min)
So what's this crazy talk, and am I on crack? Well, creating general or human-level intelligence, cryonics and nano-assemblers are on the fringes of scientific acceptability today (to say the most): while building a career on these would be crazy, for me these interests are an entertaining, amusing and intellectually refreshing hobby. However, it seems very likely that they will become more acceptable with time - one goal of creating the "21st Century Roadmap" was to see when this will happen. The other purpose of the roadmap is to ground and cross-check specifically Kurzweil's predictions with economic and geopolitical reality (notably the Goldman Sachs and PricewaterhouseCoopers reports). Nanomanufacturing, cryonic resucitation, unlimited lifespan through nanotech-facilitated cyborgization or brain uploading, and transhuman levels of artificial intelligence all seem possible in accordance with the Kurzweilian timeline and in a world where China and India are the engines of the Earth's economy. However, exactly because of this grounded nature of the expected changes, it is hard to buy into any scenario which advocates radical changes, such as Kurzweil's Singularity concept, de Garis' artilect war, or Goertzel's "you can surprise everyone by hacking together an AI in your garage in 5 years". While changes at the time when one human race level computation is available for one cent (2059 in Kurzweil's timeline) will be undoubtedly fast, this level builds so intimately and organically on the many grades of changes preceding it, that the ensuing complete transcedence of physical limitations by humanity will not be a moment of radical singularity, but be part of a smooth transition that has been ongoing as the stream of evolution of organized forms in the Universe... a phase which many alien civilizations throughout the Milky Way have already passed through.
I got an email a couple weeks ago, that I have a package for me at the CoC reception. Now I didn't remember ordering anything recently, and definitely not to the CoC. I went and retrieved the package:
According to the address, I've been upgraded to Professor! Gee, time flies fast, eh? ;) By now, I was totally at a loss as to what this can be... so I opened the package, and this is what I found:
Now you might wonder why somebody that I didn't know before would go to the trouble of finding my address and sending me a book. Well... I mentioned the Detailed Roadmap of the 21st Century compilation I've started in the last days of 2006 before. The roadmap found its way to some people very interested in the future... and I got an invitation to the extensive Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation, and now I'm
listed as a "futurist" along with such people as Ray Kurzweil, Max More and many more. To quote Wikipedia, "the Lifeboat Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a possible technological singularity". So far, my SAB membership has been only virtual... But what's with all this chit-chat about the future? I'll attempt to explain in the next post...
Oh yeah... I forgot to mention it on the blog so far, but I made this Detailed Roadmap of the 21st Century during my winter holiday in Hungary :) Interestingly, I didn't mention it to anyone at GT either... the news just traveled back from Michael Anissimov's blog, thru Nanowerk and possibly thru the Responsible Nanotechnology blog. I'll write more about this when I have some time, but for now, let me just say that I happened to visit the Singularity Summit at Stanford page on the the second day of Christmas (December 26th), which reminded me of my long-standing, but recently neglected interest in the future... which I revived that day (hurray for symbolism :)
(In related news, Numenta's experimental HTM platform was released today...)
So Atlanta will have a streetcar... Struck by a moment of creativity, I though: how would the old trams of Budapest look like on Peachtree Street? And how would those modern trams I have seen in Bordeaux and Athens look in Atlanta? In yet another attempt to bring Europe and America closer together, I give you nine concept photos, travelling from Midtown into Downtown... Full-size photos are available on this page!
Atlanta will have a streetcar on Peachtree Street from Buckhead to southwest of downtown, and an additional downtown loop. Check out the planned route map! There are more details in the feasibilty study PDF on the Atlanta Streetcar Inc.'s site, like this concept photo:
I'm very happy for this development, although it will take several years before we can first board a tram in Atlanta. I've written recently about how a "walkable city" is the indicator of a quality city, with far-reaching consequences to businesses. Streetcars (or trams) have always been popular on the streets of Central Europe, and have become popular in all of Europe in recent years (remeber my photos from Bordeaux or Athens...?)
I'm using Europe's busiest tram line (no. 4/6 in Budapest) to go to Budapest U from home. This line has 200,000 travellers daily... (Atlanta's two tram lines are planned to transit 21,500 passengers per day.) Let's hope construction starts soon...
A closeup map of the routes in the Midtown-Downtown area, and two more concept photos are below...
So you thought construction on the GT campus is finally almost finished? Not quite...
The Instructional Center will be razed, the Student Center parking deck will be razed, Ferst Drive and Tech Parkway will be joined and rerouted, and a bunch of new buildings built on the freed areas. Peters parking deck (near the stadium) will be razed and turned into a park. The library will get a large extension. The Electrical Engineering rotunda will give way to a new structure. Atlantic Drive will be pedestrian-only from Ferst towards the campus center. We'll get a new nanotech building, and some other buildings in north campus. A stormwater management area with ponds, meadows and stream-like waterways will take the place of vast parking lots in north campus. Tennis courts will move next to the Recreation Center. Cars will be pushed into new parking decks from parking lots, which means less concrete desert and more greenery. New housing will also be built.
So don't even expect an end of construction work... it won't happen. The major changes planned to unfold until 2012 are highlighted on this map:
Check out the "Master Plan" yourself at GT's Capital Planning & Space Management. There is other cool stuff there, like a collection of then-and-now photos of Georgia Tech. Can you imagine that once there was no interstate, and GT meant only the southeast corner of today's campus? Can you imagine that until 1972, Hephill Avenue went right through the heart of today's campus? Similar then-and-now comparison photos of Atlanta are at the Atlanta Time Machine.
I did one of the final exams today, the other one is coming up tomorrow. In the meanwhile...
Groove Coverage (a German eurotrance group) has a hot new single that I've heard on French Puls'Radio. The lyrics goes:
I'm a 21st century digital girl,
I don't know how to love, but I live in this world,
My daddy is a workaholic millionaire,
My mom is on drugs, but I don't really care.
Here's a sample recorded from Puls'Radio: Groove Coverage: 21st Century Digital Girl (club mix, audio only) (sample)
So much for traditional family values, LOL! As things are going, though, that sounds like what my daughter might say about her family in 2025. (The daddy part is clear, right? And just think a little to figure out why the Mrs would be on drugs.) A grim vision indeed...
For a brighter future, check out the quite-new (March 2006) PricewaterhouseCoopers report "The World in 2050". I didn't have time to read yet, but reviews consider it similar to Goldman-Sachs' 2050 report, I've written about. In addition to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) they point out Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey as high-growth regions (which they have named the Emerging Seven, or E7). Initially, China continues as the leader in growth, but India will take over.
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