Will our children become cyborgs?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, futurism, artificial intelligence, the singularity

I started these book reviews just after The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil, was published. I am not sure I read the book; I think I read some reviews, and an article or two by Kurzweil about the subject. Nineteen years have passed, and Ray Kurzweil has doubled down on his forecasts with The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI.

As I recall, in 2005 The Singularity referred to a time when the author expected certain technological and sociological trends to force a merging of human and machine intelligences, and he forecast this to occur about the year 2045. The new book tinkers with the dates a bit, but not by much. One notable change: in 2005 he considered the compute capacity of the human brain to be 10¹⁶ calculations per second, with memory about 10¹³ bits (~100 GBytes: woefully small by modern estimates). His current estimate is 10¹⁴ calculations per second, and I don't recall that he mentioned memory capacity at all.

I am encouraged that Kurzweil doesn't see us at odds with AI, or AI at odds with us, but as eternal collaborators. I'll be 98 in 2045, and I am likely to be still alive. Time will tell.

I am an algorithmicist. I built much of my career on improving the efficiency of computer code to squeeze out maximum calculations-per-second from a piece of hardware. But a "calculation" is a pretty slippery item. In the 1960's and 1970's mainframe computers were rated in MIPS, Millions of Instructions Per Second. Various benchmark programs were used to "exercise" a machine to measure this, because it doesn't correlate cleanly with cycle time. Some instructions (e.g., "Move Word#348762 to Register 1") might consume one clock cycle, while others (e.g., "Add Register 1 to Register 2 and store the result in Register 3") might require six cycles; and the calculation wasn't really finished until another instruction put the result from the Register back in a memory location. The 1970's saw a changeover from MIPS to MFLOPS, or Millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second, to measure machine power. Supercomputers of the day, such as the CDC Cyber 6600 and the Cray-1, could perform "math" operations such as addition, in a single cycle, so a machine with a cycle time of 1 MHz could approach a rate of 1 MFLOPS (Note: The Cray-1 and later Cray machines used "pipeline processors", a limited kind of parallel processing, to finesse a rate of 1-FLOP-per-cycle. The Cray-1 achieved 100 MFLOPS).

The middle of the book is filled with little charts explaining all the trends that Kurzweil sees coming together. This is the central chart:

This is from page 165. Note that the vertical scale is logarithmic; each scale division is 10x as great at the one below. The units are FLOPS/$, but spelled out longer, because before 1970 the FLOPS rate had to be estimated from MIPS ratings. Also, the last two points are for the Google TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), a takeoff of the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), which is specialized for extremely broad-scale massively parallel learning needed to train programs such as ChatGPT or Gemini. One cannot own a TPU, they can only be leased, so some figuration had to be done to make the data points "sit" in a reasonable spot on the chart. The dollars are all normalized to 2023.

The trend I get from these points (an exponential line from the second point through the next-to-last), is 52.23 doublings in 80 years, or a doubling each 18.4 months. It is also a factor of ten each five years plus a month (61 months). Of course, the jitter of the charted line indicates that progress isn't all that smooth, but the idea is clear. Whatever is happening today, can be done about ten times as fast in five years, or one can do ten times as much in the same time, five years from now.

When I was in graduate school, about 1980 (I was several years older than my classmates) we were asked to write an essay on how we would determine the progress of plate tectonics back in time "about 2 billion years", and whether computer modeling could help. I outlined the scale of simulation that would be needed, and stated that running the model to simulate Earth history for a couple billion years would take at least ten years of computer time on the best processors of the day. I suggested that it would be best to take our time to prepare a good piece of simulation software, but to "wait ten years, until a machine will be available that is able to run 100 times as fast for an economical cost". I didn't get a good grade. As it turned out, from 1978 to 1988 the trend of "fastest machine" is seen to be flat on the chart above! It took another five or six years for the trend to catch up after that period of doldrums. Now you can view a video of the motions of tectonic plates around the globe over the past 1.8 billion years, and the simulation can be run on most laptops.

So, I get Kurzweil's point. Machines are getting faster and cheaper and perhaps one day there will be a computer system that is smaller than the average Target store, which can hold, not just the simulation of one person's brain, but the whole human race. However, as I said, I am an algorithmicist. What is the algorithm of consciousness? Kurzweil says at least a couple of times that if 10¹⁴ calculations per second per brain turn out not to be enough, "soon" after that there will be enough compute capacity to simulate the protein activity in every neuron in a brain, and later on enough to simulate all of humanity, so that the whole human race could become a brain in a box.

Of course, that isn't the future he envisions for us. He prefers that we not be replaced by hardware, but augmented. Brain-to-machine interfaces are coming. He has no more clue than I do what scale of intervention is needed in a brain so it can handle the bandwidth of data transfer needed to, say, double the "native" compute capacity of a person, let along increase it by a factor of 10, 100, ... or a billion. At what point does the presence of a human brain in the machine even matter? I suspect even a doubling of our compute capacity is not possible.

Let's step back a bit. In an early chapter we learn a little about the cerebellum, which contains 3/4 of our neurons and more than 3/4 of the neuron-to-neuron connectivity of the total brain, all in 10% of its volume. With hardly a by-your-leave, Kurzweil goes on to other things, but I think this is utterly critical. The cerebellum allows our brain to interact with the world. It runs the body and mediates all our senses. Not just the "classic 5", but all of the 20 or more senses that are needed to keep a human body running smoothly. Further, I see nothing about the limbic system; it's only 1% of the brain, but without it we cannot decide anything. It is the core of what it "feels like to be human," among other crucial functions. Everything we do and everything we experience has an emotional component.

Until we fully understand what the 10% and the 1% are doing, it makes little sense to model the other 89% of the brain's mass. Can AI help us understand consciousness? I claim, no, Hell no, never in a million years. It will take a lot of HUMAN work to crack that nut. AI is just a tool. It cannot transcend its training databank.

At this point, I'll end by saying, I find Ray Kurzweil's writing very engaging but not compelling. I enjoyed reading the book, and not just so I could pooh-pooh things. His ideas are worth considering, and taking note of. Some of his forecasts could be right on. But I suspect the ultimate one, of actually merging with AI, of all of us becoming effectively cyborgs?… No way.

The irresistible impulse to predict

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, speculation, prediction, futurism

The second chapter of The Skeptics' Guide to the Future: What Yesterday's Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow, by Dr. Steven Novella and his brothers Bob Novella and Jay Novella, begins with a quote by the sage of the ball park, Yogi Berra: "The future ain't what it used to be."

I can think of three facts about the 1969 landing on the Moon by astronauts of Apollo 11, that were not anticipated by science fiction writers, nor by futurists in general:

1. Between 10% and 30% of Americans believe it was all a hoax.
2. The sponsor was not a corporation nor a "rich industrialist" but the Federal government.
3. The world watched Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder on color TV.

It took only 50 years for a few "rich industrialists" to gather both the financial muscle and the personal will to start spaceship companies, and at present there are three! In the golden age of space fiction, mainly pre-1960, nobody dreamed the combined Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programs would cost about a trillion dollars (in current dollars).

What did science fiction get right? Arthur Clarke foretold telecommunications via synchronous satellites in 1945, 12 years before Sputnik 1 surprised the world. On the dystopian side, George Orwell wrote in 1948 of a pervasive surveillance state (he was mixing Stalin with his expectation of immense progress in video technology); now it is upon us. More prosaically, in 1911 Hugo Gernsback wrote of video chatting; of course the inimitable Hugo made dozens of predictions in everything he wrote, so getting it right once in a while is simple statistics in this case.

What approach do the Novella brothers take? I'd call Skeptics' Guide a catalog of futurist ideas sorted by plausibility. I am amused by the title of Chapter 3, "The Science of Futurism." To me, that's an oxymoron. Science is about what we know, or think we know. Stuff that hasn't happened cannot be a scientific subject. To me, futurist speculation is fun, and when folks in a position to know more than most of us about technological and sociological trends speculate that one or another trend "has legs" and is likely to affect all of us, it's worth taking note. Some decent fraction of the time, the speculation turns into fact.

The authors sagely note that it's hard to distinguish robust trends from fads. I look back at a number of things I once thought were "neaty-keen!", that have vanished from the scene, with decidedly mixed feelings. I tried out a Segway at a science park once. I like them. The business model was fatally flawed, though, and my insurance company would probably have charged me more than the cost of the machine...per year. So as much as I hope for the rapid development and spread of self-driving autos, I suspect I won't live to see them "take over" (but I'll get one of they do!).

Or maybe I'll live long enough for many more trends to play out. The next-to-last chapter deals with indefinite life extension. Scale that back to "let's make it possible for most people to live 100-120 years in good health", and I have a decent chance to use or own (if we still own cars in 2040) a self-driving car, and to have not a robot butler but instead several (affordable!) robotic appliances, such as one that can make a decent omelet. Maybe I'll live to see actual, true, artificial general intelligence (AGI). My goal post for AGI is that a mechanism, entirely without "handlers and minders", does research, produces something new, and obtains a patent. A secondary goal post: one that can carry on a discussion on numerous subjects, and hold its own at a meeting of an intelligent, well-read Book of the Month Club.

Of course, artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) is beginning to do some very interesting things. One is the language understanding behind "art generators" such as Dall-E and "text generators" such as ChatGPT, and the object recognition behind image sharpeners such as Sharpen AI. Would life in a settlement on Mars such as the one shown here appeal to you? I prompted Dall-E to create this image. It's a portion of a larger image I "created" with "outpainting". ANI is beginning to push our culture in new directions.

After the introductory part of the book, each of the four sections deals with matters that are less and less likely. The last section discusses the impossible, at least until new laws of physics are discovered: time travel, transporters, and faster-than-light travel for example. My, how prone we are to wrestle against the constraints of the universe!

The point is often made that fiction writers and futurist writers cannot escape putting today's people into their future scenarios. A small number of people are fanatical about "living forever", but do they have a way to predict the social disruption that would result, if even 0.1% of humans became effectively immortal? The authors discuss both positive and negative views of this, and are careful not to draw conclusions. It would be a Black Swan moment for the human race. While I'd like to "not die", I am not willing for evil people to live long enough to get really, really evil. Imagine if Stalin or Mao Zedong were still alive...

As good as the writing is, the book is rather insipid. The authors didn't want to be sensationalists. They succeeded at that.

Yogi Berra also said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Genetics collides with human nature - scared yet?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetic engineering, crispr, futurism, trends

I try to keep up to date with certain trends, including genetic engineering. When a technical field such as that is so productive and active, however, it is easy to get behind, and even to be blind-sided by developments. Prompted by a friend, I saw a podcast about gene editing, an interview with Jamie Metzl, so I got his latest book, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. I find the possible futures outlined by the author deeply disturbing, even frightening.

Consider a doctor's visit in 2030; you want to have a baby with your spouse. You have been advised to seek pre-natal screening. You find that, rather than starting the baby with "ordinary" sex, it is now advisable to use In-Vitro Fertilization, followed by egg harvesting, and genetic testing of each of the several embryos thus produced (one cell taken from each embryo). Within a couple of days on a follow-up visit, the doctor shows the two of you a kind of dashboard with dozens of indicators showing how the embryos differ. Some will grow a little taller than the rest; some might be smarter; there are even a few subtle shades of skin color available; and while two embryos are likely to grow to be more intelligent, one of those also carries a significant risk of a troubling birth defect. You can't have everything, but you and your spouse go aside and weigh the options. If none is appealing, you can always try another batch, though it'll double the cost. Once an embryo is chosen, it is implanted and the others are frozen, where they will probably remain until you decide they can be discarded. Consider; this could happen before 2030!

Try to wrap your mind around the possibilities after another ten years: 2040. It is likely by then that you don't need to do egg harvesting from the female spouse; a cheek scraping or a drop of blood contains cells that can be turned into stem cells, and after a further process, thousands of ova, which the male spouse's sperm can fertilize. The dashboard not only has many more embryos to choose from, the number of genetic indicators now numbers in the thousands. Thankfully, the flurry of data has been pre-screened using Artificial Intelligence, and profiles for only a handful of embryos are presented, and for each, the top twenty most-important indicators are shown, though you can drill down into them all if you wish. As before, this process may be available before 2040.

Why would you do this? If, quite literally, everyone is having babies this way, there is great competitive pressure to set your baby up to be smart, strong, long-lived, tall, and good looking. If you take the "primitive way" of "winging it" with "ordinary" sex, you are most likely to have a child who would be average, or hopefully a bit above average (if both spouses are already a little above average). But that child will be way, way below average compared to nearly everyone else. Just by having "average" good health, he or she will pay more in medical insurance premiums, in anticipation of living a shorter life in poorer health than the norm.

Is this the kind of world we want to live in? Will we have a choice?

The bulk of Hacking Darwin explains the literal flood of new technologies being developed right now that portend this kind of future. The competitive nature in all of us ensures that any slight advantage to be gained by these new genetic techniques will be extremely popular. Will they be used by the rich (the first to be able to afford all of the techniques) to produce children who will easily become even richer, leaving the rest of humanity in the dust? They will most certainly try! When "designer babies" (not a new term, but now a reality on the horizon) become affordable for the rich, "Boom!", they'll go for it. A generation later, when the price has dropped to 1% of what it was, the middle class can try to play catch-up, but they'll be a generation behind.

In the last chapter or two of the book the author discusses the kinds of regulations that governments the world over will need to implement to even out the playing field. One look at history tells me he's spitting into a strong wind. Firstly, different nations will adopt different regulations and at different times. The present emotional battles over GM (genetically modified) crops and abortion will be as a friendly game of checkers compared to what will result. Medical tourism is going on now, for procedures that cost less elsewhere (Go to France for a bone marrow transplant, for example, where it costs 1/10 of the cost in the U.S., and the French have a better track record). Genetic tourism will soon be all the rage. Live in a country that outlaws the "big dashboard"? No problem. Take a month's vacation to somewhere less restrictive. Lie through your teeth about why you went…or don't return, if the questioners will be gun-toting officials. 

Put it all together, and an era of post-humanism is rapidly approaching. By 2050 or so, "Engineer your own Baby" kits will be available over-the-counter. By 2100, who will be left that would be recognizable as an "ordinary human" today? Maybe many, maybe few, possibly none. To the friend who suggested I listen to the podcast, I wrote, "I hope Jesus returns while there are still humans to return to."

Polyanna on Steroids

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, futurism, forecasting, internet

Émile Coué taught his patients to repeat as a mantra, "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better." It is no coincidence that he is a co-discoverer of the placebo method. There is no irony in saying that many of his patients did indeed improve, because reassurance can powerfully influence our feelings and speed our healing, whether emotional or physical. Now, if only we could induce society as a whole to adopt this mantra!

Byron Reese may be the man to do it. He just needs a bigger pulpit. For the time being, his book must do: Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War. The book was published in 2013, shortly after the beginning of the second term of President Obama. The one positive thing to come out of Mr. Obama's work is his book The Audacity of Hope. By comparison with Mr. Reese's book, it seems short-sighted.

Using the past as a springboard into the future, Infinite Progress outlines the large trends that the author expects to continue into the future, and to produce ever-increasing prosperity, from which the other benefits will be derived. Thinking back over his contentions and discussions, I must agree in part. These things can happen. Whether they will or not, human nature will have a big part to play, but so will nature. The current Coronavirus pandemic and the over-reaction of the immune system of the body politic is a Black Swan to beat all black swans.

I was much enamored with the book The Black Swan, and have written about the principle a few times. However, I was seduced, as was N.N. Taleb, the author, by the Cauchy Distribution he cites as a good model for stock market activity (it isn't, but that's another story). I was seduced into thinking that black swans are part of the normal course of things; that they are extreme but otherwise unexceptional. Of course, they are not. The Europeans who were astonished to see black swans in Australia didn't initially realize that the Australian Swan is a different species, Cygnus atratus, than the mute swan, Cygnus olor. I also considered floods and the seeming over-abundance of 1,000-year floods in some areas. However, on closer examination, the extreme floods are produced by a different climatic mechanism than the more ordinary seasonal floods of the five-to-hundred-year variety. They are part of a different population, a different species of storm, if you'll forgive me the use of a biological term.

As dominant as the present pandemic seems to be, the trends Byron Reese outlines may be delayed, but possibly not by very much. I like his analyses, and I hope he is right. But allow me to comment on the five trends, not as a skeptic, but for a cautionary purpose.

• Ignorance – To summarize a story from a century-old Christian tract: A believer was witnessing to a friend who owned a soap factory. The friend was skeptical. They came across a dirty boy playing in a mud puddle. The believer asked, "Why is this boy dirty? Your soap factory is nearby!" The friend said, "Soap is only helpful if you use it." The believer replied, "So is the Gospel." Then, from a piece of calligraphy on my bedroom wall: "Wisdom is knowing what to do / Knowledge is knowing how to do it / Success is doing it". Near-infinite knowledge on more subjects than any person will ever even know exist (Wikipedia has 6+ million articles in English and many more in 300+ other languages; Google indexes 30 trillion web pages). It isn't hard to find out a lot about anything. But I have a maxim and a corollary that are worth a book of their own: "Those who will learn from others have fewer scars. Most people have too many scars."
  
• Disease – Most doctors begin their careers full of optimism and altruism. Far too many succumb to a profit motive and end up using "treatments" that maximize cash flow rather than minimizing suffering. Most drug and medical equipment companies were begun similarly, and followed a similar, cynical path. Perhaps we must adopt an attitude of "I pay only for success, not for 'trying'." By the way, it is stated on page 90 (in the eBook), "Even smallpox has been sequenced and is available for download." One insane person can bring it back; millennials and younger are not vaccinated… But to the point, let's make sure cures are profitable and infinitesimal "improvements" are not.
• Poverty – Jesus said, "The poor you will always have with you." He knew human nature. People differ dramatically in ability, and some just roll nothing but Snake Eyes. However, as prosperity spreads, as Reagan's Trickle-down Theory works its magic (don't scoff, it led to the biggest postwar boom ever, including the recent one from 2/2017-2/2020), "poverty" will be defined as having a smaller TV, and perhaps only one thereof (rather than not having a house in which to put one); having only one "good suit" (rather than having only rags); and so forth. America's poor are better off than all but the richest Africans. The other question to ask is, can Earth sustain that level of prosperity for all? Is our planet big enough? This is not sufficiently addressed in the book. A big part of the book's plan is offloading all dehumanizing tasks to machines. Are we ennobled by idleness? Because there may not be enough "humanizing" tasks to go around.
• Hunger – The author seems to have assimilated without question a statement by Colin Clark in 1967, that the minimum space necessary to feed a person was 27 square kilometers. I beg your pardon?? He must have misread Clark. The land surface area of Earth is about 148 million sq km, and the arable (farmable) area is 31 million. At 27 per, that could only feed a little over one million of us. Arable surface per person is presently just over one acre. I looked up Colin Clark's writings. His estimate of maximum population ranged from 28 billion to about twice that (…for American standard of living, and 148 billion at a Japanese standard of living), but he over-measured the arable surface, so as well as I can determine, he considered the land needed per person at about 270 square meters (Japanese standard) or 680 sq m (American standard). As the author tells us, most hunger is structural, meaning people can't afford food or can't travel to where it is affordable, because the Earth still has a food surplus. I'll comment later on population growth. The author believes we'll always find away to increase yields.
• War – The trends and discussion boil down to this: Make war economically unaffordable, and most warfare will end. More trade, more co-industry and so forth. Of course, there is still fanaticism we must deal with, and the lesson of the 9/11 disaster and the ensuing 19 years is that the existence of "The Great Satan" (i.e., the USA) is sufficient reason for ongoing warfare between Islam and the West. (Note, I consider the term "radical Islam" to be a redundancy). Ideology will always trump prosperity.

Will there come a time of plenty and peace? As a Christian, knowing human nature from decades of counseling unhappy people, and believing the Bible, I see peace only in the kingdom of God. But of course this book has no relation to anything Biblical. The author is a historian, not a theologian. So let's suppose his dream largely comes true. Not as all problems being solved, but the five big ones he identifies being largely mitigated. Will the 24^th Century be a Star Trek century of peace and plenty? A lot depends on how rapidly human population approaches the "Japanese standard of living" threshold of 148 billion. For it is sure to do so.

The global rate of population growth is 1.1%/yr. That's lower than it was when I was a child, by about half. Will it go lower? First let's look at what results if it doesn't:

• near-Today (3/2020): 7.8B
• Year 2100: 18.7B
• Year 2200: 56B
• Year 2300: 167B – This is close to the year the Enterprise would be launched in Star Trek.

Oops! We've already passed 148B. Will farming methods have improved enough that we can feed one-sixth of a trillion people? Probably. But there won't be a chicken in every pot, that's for sure. Not even a vat-grown pseudo-chicken. So here is another maxim of mine:

Just because Malthusian predictions have been shown to be wrong several times, doesn't mean that will happen forever.

OK, Let's cut the rate of population growth in half, or a bit better, to 0.5%/yr. Then:

• Year 2100: 11.6B – Better…
• Year 2200: 19.1B
• Year 2300: 31.5B
• Year 2400: 52B – About where the table above was in 2200.

And so it goes. Hundreds of years may seem like a long time, but sooner or later the permanent mantra of all living things, "Reproduce or else!" must come to an end or we'll just eat the whole planet. Isaac Asimov once showed that, if 10% of all substances on the surface of the earth could be converted to food, Earth would still be exhausted, at a 0.5% growth rate, in a couple of thousand years, and if we have gone to the stars by then, all possible planets in this galaxy will be comprised or people and people's food from pole to pole, in another 11,000 years.

And all that is not even a black swan. The sixth item that needs to be tackled is the human drive to reproduce, or everything else is temporary. Thus, I must conclude, even though the book's title is Infinite Progress, we must content ourselves with "Really immense progress" followed by some very well-thought-out Plan B when that isn't enough.

Does that mean I deny the author's reasoning? Not at all. I hope he is at least partially right. But there are so many ways to go wrong, and so few ways for things to go right, that it will be an uphill slog. I like the optimism. That alone makes it worth reading and thinking about.