Mind Controlled Wheelchair

Last week the Christian Science Monitor had this story about Toyota’s new mind controlled wheelchair.

Not much to complain about with this one, but the comments below the article were fun. They joked about hoping the controllers were not thinking about anything complicated like last night’s game, or today’s sit com situation, or tomorrow’s consequences of higher math, when they were out and about. They envisioned unfortunate accidents with hapless pedestrians (as if that sort of thing didn’t ever happen now). Somebody got pissed at the levity surrounding this major breakthrough for the disabled. As if joking about tech for the disabled was the same as joking about the disabled.

I suppose it’s true: we should stay serious when discussing our sacred, exalted tech. On the other hand, as far as I’m concerned the purpose of tech is to serve as fodder for humor, regardless of what the tech is about. It all makes good entertainment.

A mind controlled wheelchair is certainly wonderful, but if I were the disabled person who this was designed for, I’d be wondering when the mind controlled artificial limbs were going to arrive. Especially if I’d already learned how to get around using my arms or even better: my voice. The plain old vanilla wheelchair was the breakthrough and this is not much of an upgrade.

The importance of this, then, is not what it can do for the disabled. What is exciting is that it’s a direct precursor to mind controlled everything. Cars and chairs will be great, but I want to go further. I want everything to move without my expending any more energy than what it takes to produce a thought. Not since the clap-on light switch have we seen such a breakthrough in labor savingness. And I can’t wait for its application.

Housework will get done Betwitched-style. Just a wiggle of the nose and the place cleans itself: dusts, vacuums, launders, organizes the shoes.
Obviously we’re not there yet, but this is a step in the Darren and Samantha Stevens direction. And anything that makes good on the Hollywood promise of suburban happiness is okay in my book.

Sue Lange
Sue Lange’s bookshelf at BookViewCafe.com

Be the First on your Block to get Your Very Own Neural Interface System

Step right up folks: http://www.braingate2.org/clinicalTrials.asp

I was thinking of signing up, but then I read that “Caution: Investigational Device.” Somehow my alligator brain kicked in, forming the words “guinea pig.” Not sure I want to have this procedure until they’ve perfected the technique. It’s not like I have a loss of any of my limbs (although my SO likes to think my head doesn’t always work right).

Still it would be way cool to get inanimate objects to respond to my every command. Like that Russian lady, Nina Kulagina.

Clifford Simak the author and TransAlchemy the Twitterer

Over at Twitter, there’s a bunch of Singularists that I follow. TransAlchemy is one such person. This particular Twitterer has put together an interesting YouTube video entitled “Message to our Descendents.” It’s a personal statement to all things human, now and in the future. He’s got several messages actually, each one to a different flavor of humanity: human born human, AI, and posthuman.

Sounds kind of United Nationsy, but actually it’s quite entertaining. There’s a driving music riff behind the thing, computer generated of course. No acoustic instruments. He’s also got a driving scroll of code in old-fashioned screen green flying past on the left side. And there’s coffee bar clatter and chatter in the background. In front of all this he thoughtfully delivers his messages.

The part that I found most interesting was at about the 3 ½ minute mark when he launches the message for AI and makes this chilling statement: “You would not have come about had it not been for humans that invented you.”

I know, what’s so scary about that? I’ll get to that. For now, know that I just finished reading Clifford Simak’s book “City.” The premise of this book is that the Dogs have inherited the Earth. They can speak and organize and are now the highest organic intelligence around. There isn’t a single human left walking about.

City is not a preachy book with a message about how if we don’t change our evil ways, this could be you. It’s mostly a picture of how evolution might go as we humans bumble along our technological time line. We could all end up moving completely off the planet and into a whole new species. On Earth the only record of human activity may one day exist only in the mind of a single robot. A really old robot. One that gets wistful about man’s greatest achievement: the evening cocktail.

The evening cocktail may very well be our greatest achievement, but for us humans here and now, we like to think we’ve done rather more than that. We have our great art, our great technological inventions. Certainly all that’s worth a mention. Truth is, though, our descendents may never appreciate any of it. We may be lucky if they even acknowledge it or us for that matter.

City was published in 50’s and so of course there’s no hint of the Singularity anywhere in the book. The thing that connects this non-Singularity book with TransAlchemy’s Singularity video is the fact that in City, the Dogs just can not get it through their heads that humans not only gave the Dogs their ability to talk, but they created the robots as well. The Dogs don’t want to believe that. Humans could never have achieved any of it. They simply weren’t capable.

Back in the here and now, TransAlchemy’s video tells the future AIs that humans created them. Maybe that won’t be future common knowledge. Maybe these AIs will not be enlightened on that point. I wonder if our technological descendents will laugh at the idea, just as Simak’s Dogs did. Are we, in the scheme of things, just so apparently incompetent?

Whoever inherits the Earth–Dogs, AIs, posthumans–may end up giving you and me credit for little more than the ability to make a great martini in the late afternoon.

I know, I know, is there really anything more important than that?

Scusteister
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I Want One of These

This falls in the “I want one of these” category:

http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/templates/Signal_Article_Template.asp?articleid=1964&zoneid=263
Yeah, yeah, the soldiers’ weapons of death will be able to adapt to the desert and then switch over to jungle mode when called upon to do so. Our domination of the planet will be complete. That’s nice, but this thing is so much bigger than that.

Check out the tool box. You buy what amounts to a can of paint and inside you get any tool you’ll ever need. You want a wrench? Command “Wrench!” Voila. You have a wrench. This is so beyond nifty.

Changing from a wrench to a hammer is certainly great, but think of this: no more having to carry around a complete set of metric sockets as well as a complete set of English sockets in case you ever have to disassemble an appliance of unknown origin. Keep in mind the misery of the socket set completist. Half of any set of sockets, regardless which system it is, gets lost down the drain. Now you have to start buying the single pieces to replace the lost ones, but they don’t fit in the foam cutouts in the original carrying case because the new sockets are a different brand and they aren’t quite the same. Now you have to buy a big toolbox to hold all the floaters. Eventually the little things get lost in the mix of crap at the bottom of every toolbox, so now you have to go back and buy some more and…

You see what I’m saying here. This is so much bigger than one country beating the crap out of another country. What we’re talking about here is no less than an organized toolbox. Without actually having to organize it. Do you know how valuable that is?

Even beyond that, I’ve seen men in the tool department at Sears, drooling over the 52 piece sets of [screwdrivers/socket wrenches/router bits/wood chisels]. No one can justify buying a complete set of anything because you know you’ll never use more than just 4 or 5 of the basics, but still you want a complete set. It looks so neat and it comes with a carrying case.

This materials science here, this is a gold mine. All you do is buy that one paint can and you have a complete set of everything including a Dremel kit which no one ever uses but is necessary nonetheless. And the paint can is the carrying case.

The only monkey wrench I can see is that it seems like this only works with organic materials, i.e. long chain polymers, i.e. plastics. A really good tool, a hammer, or a wrench, say, is made from steel which is mostly iron and a little bit of carbon and maybe some other metals if it’s for a high end tool. Metal molecules don’t work like other molecules such as long chain organics. I wonder if the scientists will get the metals to behave correctly. To follow orders. To change shape on command.

I wouldn’t put a lot of money on a plastic screwdriver, even if it could turn into a hammer, or a wrench, or a crowbar at my verbal command. It would certainly be fun at a cocktail party, no doubt about that, but can it fix a flat on a highway in a rain storm in the middle of the night and then when I get home repair the fencing, finish the roofing, and snake out the plugged toilet?

Waiting with bated breath to find out.

Sue Lange’s BookShelf at BookViewCafe.com

The Flying Car is Here

Here’s a cool thing: the famous flying car is finally here: http://www.terrafugia.com/Video_News_Release.html

In 2006 the Boston Herald ran this article: http://www.terrafugia.com/news/archives/2006-0419-BostonHerald.pdf. Note the delivery date for the working prototype was 2008 with commercial product available by now. So we’re about a year behind schedule. Not bad. We’ll be seeing these things in the air in our lifetime.

Reality check: This is not a flying car. It’s a combo car/airplane meant to take off and land at airports, not your driveway. The idea is you use the car to drive to the airport and instead of paying for parking and buying a seat on a plane, you take off into the wild blue yonder yourself. I’m sure it won’t be as cheap as all that. I imagine there are fees to do this sort of thing, but I also can’t imagine that it will cost anywhere near what parking at Philly’s airport does. The last time I did that, the parking was more expensive than the flight.

At any rate, if you’re up for the twenty hours’ time it takes to get your pilot’s license as well as the amount of money it will cost to buy the thing (back in 2006 they predicted it would be about $50,000 cheaper than buying a Cessna 171) you will be the proud owner of a plane with retractable wings. A flight-enabled car, if you will. The great thing is that even if you can’t fly it home, you can at least park it in your driveway. These bragging rights alone will probably drive this industry.

Point is, this is not the George Jetson car plane we have all been waiting for. Too bad. So sad.

So what’s next then for the rest of us? Realistically what we are waiting for is the autopiloted car. How far away can it be? We’ve already got Matilde, the GPS hostess, recalculating every time we countermand her orders. She’s clever that Matilde is, and accurate. How long before she’s actually driving the vehicle without us? http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2007/11/car-autopilot-t.html

The sooner we get this the better, in my opinion. As long as it’s got accident avoidance software and the sensory hardware to go with it, a computer will be better at driving under hazardous conditions such as at night in general, in blinding snow storms, in blinding rain storms, and with a pack of blind drunk teenagers in the car, than a human ever could be.

The one drawback with Matilde is that since she’s moved into the family, my orienteering skills have deteriorated. Now that I no longer use Rand McNally or Mapquest to get somewhere new, I’ve lost my ability to read maps and figure out how to get to strange places in my neighborhood. Matilde has dumbed me down. Things are safer and more efficient with the GPS system, but we are all definitely getting dumber.

Even pre-Singularity, we are losing our survival skills.

Scusteister
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Future Energy

Here’s an interesting item: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-05/asfm-swt051409.php

New ideas for using “lignocellulosic biomass” as fuel. Lots of research on figuring out which poplar trees are the exact correct species to use.

Am I the only one thinking this situation might be just a little hypocritical when there’s this: http://www.hemp4fuel.com/news.php?item.204.11 ?

I did a quick survey of the Internet to find the reason we’re not looking at using hemp – a naturally occurring substance that doesn’t need trillions of research dollars to develop because god/evolution already did that – for at least part of our energy needs. Upshot: I couldn’t find much anti-hemp information.

I’ve been watching this hemp controversy for about ten years. It’s been going on a lot longer than that, but that’s how long I’ve been watching it. The pro-hemp arguments have pretty much been the same all along: it’s cheap to grow, environmentally safer than anything else, there’s a million things you can do with it including using it as a fuel source. Strong arguments you’ll agree and in fact tons of industrialized countries are already using it. The U.S. is lagging. Through all these ten years of my watching the arguments for hemp not changing, the argument against hemp hasn’t changed either. It remains this: the cops can’t tell the difference between industrial hemp and marijuana.

So that’s the reason. The question you ask then is why is marijuana illegal in the first place? The pro-hemp sites offer up a diabolical and bizarre Dupont/Carnegie/Hearst conspiracy that started way back on the 1930s. It’s a long story but the result is that today marijuana is illegal even though almost everybody has either tried it at least once or uses it regularly with fewer ill effects than alcohol usage. Personally I think the people with power don’t like the way pot makes people at peace with the world. Who would fight the wars if everybody was stoned?

At any rate, because the cops can’t tell the difference between THC-free industrial hemp and THC-laced marijuana we can’t grow the miracle substance of the century.

Whether or not the hemp advocates are right or wrong is not the issue here. The issue is that we don’t know if they’re right or wrong because there’s no research dollars to find out. The reason there’s no research dollars is because nobody wants to do research on something that might never be available because of illegality. So.

How do we make cultivation of cannabis legal? Answer: change the law. How do we change the law? People demand the law be changed. By “people” I mean the bulk of Americans, the middle class. Unfortunately these are the people that have a dread fear of their children growing up to be drug addicts. And they’re convinced a straight line between recreational marijuana and full blown heroin addiction exists. That is a whole other argument and not the issue here either.

The point is, if industrial hemp provides a source of cheaper fuel, people (American middle class) will get behind legalization in a heart beat. The price of fuel determines American middle class politics. It got us a regime change didn’t it?

Our future lies in our energy resources. Isn’t it hypocritical to pretend we’re working fervently on solving our energy needs using long drawn-out procedures when some real quick answers are right around the corner?

I’m not a pot-smoker, but I am an energy user and a tree-hugger. Let’s leave the trees for the birds and termites. Get a cannabis field going.

Sue Lange
Visit Sue Lange’s Bookshelf at BookViewCafe.com

Chaos, Singularity, and the Belmont Stakes

It’s hard to imagine what the Triple Crown will be like in a completely digitized world. There’s so much money to be made in horse racing that player/owner/trainers try to spike the outcome any which way they can. There’s already a steroid problem. What if events could be controlled by a programmer rather than the natural abilities of athletes and riders and morning rituals? Would it still be sporting?

Take the Belmont. It could never be as interesting as this year’s. If Rachel Alexandra runs, there will be two contenders to watch this time around. Neither can win the Triple Crown, but the race on June 6th will be as exciting to watch as if they could.

You can’t plan these types of things. They have to evolve out of the chaos of breeding, nutrition, genetic mis-matching, upbringing, and the quirky way muscles and brain tissue develop on their own. And I’m not just talking about the horse. I’m talking owner, trainer, rider, and the little girl down the road that sneaks carrots in unobserved. Not to mention weather patterns any time, ever. They all contribute to the surprises that bring us horses like Mine That Bird and a filly. Fillies aren’t supposed to be there at all. If we can control the environment and cell division rates, would we still have such exciting possibilities for the Belmont? I just don’t think a programmer would be so creative.

Did Rachel Alexandra win only because it was her track: short and clear? Would Mine That Bird have won if he’d a few more lengths of time? Surely, but maybe not. Calvin Borel is cheeky. He’d have figured it out. Maybe. He said Rachel Alexandra was the best racing horse ever (and don’t forget he rode Mine That Bird in the Derby). Maybe she is the best horse ever, but maybe Borel was just being superlative in the flush of victory. Who didn’t think Rachel Alexandra was the best horse ever at that point?

It will be hard to know who to root for. Much as I love to see a filly win (especially since she gets her hair done so nice before the race), I love a horse that comes from behind. Mine That Bird does that oh so well. The question is, did he lose the Preakness because it wasn’t his track: narrow and short? Hopefully we’ll be able to find out on June 6th.

Somehow I don’t think this type of suspense would be as exciting if I knew it was all preplanned by some committee somewhere. Like with the surprise endings of the Lost episodes. I’m astonished, shocked maybe even, when we find out that John Lock’s dad is Sawyer’s dad as well, or that Sun’s baby might not be Jin’s, but I don’t brood about it for more than half a day. It all makes sense in a Hollywood soap opera kind of way. This race, this Belmont Stakes, is for real and no one knows the outcome. No one’s planned it and there is no right or wrong way for it to end. What ending will guarantee higher ticket prices next year? And keep in mind there are no stud fees riding on this race.

Stud fees. Who would put a gelding against a filly in a match? Boy are the stallions pissed. They got beat by a eunuch and a girl. If this was a post Singularity world, we’d blame the democrats for such equal opportunity. This situation here, today, is simply pure chaos, just the way we like it.

See you on the 6th.

The Singularity is Nonsense

http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_singularity_is_nonsense/

I don’t know how I came across the above “Singularity is Nonsense” piece, but I did find it interesting. I’m not sure who wrote it, either. Maybe Tim Tyler, his name’s at the bottom.

I like the page because it’s a quick explanation of what the Singularity is. A nice summation even though the writer complains vehemently about the use of the term “Singularity.” The problem is summed up best by Nick Bostrum’s quote about half way down the page: “The Singularity has been taken to mean different things by different authors…” There seems to be no general consensus of what the Singularity is or what it will mean. Or even if we’ll know when and if it happens.

To be honest, it doesn’t matter if the term is appropriate. Many of our tools are incorrectly labeled, especially if they’re part of a pop phenomenon. We call copiers Xerox machines. Our disposable hankies are Kleenexes even if they carry the Walmart brand. Lots of things are misnamed or misleading even. We still call it the United States of America even though we aren’t really. (I think, though, that folks are starting to forgive Texas so there’s hope.)

Once a name becomes popular, it’s going to stick. Especially if it helps you get your head around a difficult or just plain weird concept. This is true of the Singularity. We may not understand what a hyper ramped up world of technology with incredibly advanced artificial intelligence means, but at least with a term that’s Googleable, we can find out.

Beyond that, though, the author feels we’ll never be able to look back and decide when the Singularity happened. There probably won’t be one defining moment when machine intelligence takes over human intelligence anyway. It’s going to be a gradual co-opting of higher being status. Truly, if machine intelligence does take over gradually there can be no singularity, if the word “singularity” implies a single point in time.

The author includes a graph from Kurzweill depicting the advancing intelligence of machines, i.e. the march to the Singularity. What if that graph is wrong? What if there’s an inflection point and increasing intelligence eventually levels off like so:

There’s certainly an identifiable point in time with this model, a singularity. And we should be able to recognize it when it happens. But what is there for us to recognize?

For the record, most sf writers refer to the Singularity as the point in time we figure out how to digitize the human mind. Supposedly that event would lead to immortality of the human race. Whether on not this will ever be possible is not possible at this time to say. I wonder: if something is immortal is it truly alive? I think there’s a paradox there: it’s not life if death has no meaning for it. At any rate, we can’t imagine existence where there is no death, so that’s why we can’t predict what life for the post humans will be like. Not just because of chaos as the author states. Chaos is a current problem only. After the Singularity, there may be no more chaos.

If digitization of the brain becomes possible, we’re definitely going to know about it. It will not slip by like a gradual increase of artificial intelligence beyond human capabilities. The moment will be momentous and it will be recorded. We’ll probably video tape the new intelligent order reciting “Mary had a little lamb” or something like that. Point is, it will be remarked upon. Champagne corks will be popped, ribbons cut, and ships launched. Nothing will be the same after that.

Stanislaw Lem and the Singularity: Cyberiad

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a literary mash up with Marge Piercy and Stanislaw Lem over at BookViewCafe.com’s blog. I read these two books with their very different possible futures at the same time, a chapter of one and then a chapter of the other. In that blog I didn’t expound as much as I wanted to about the Lem book, Cyberiad, in terms of the Singularity so I’m going to do that now.

The Cyberiad was published in the 70s and so it gives us a look at what the post Singularity world would like to someone thinking about it back before we were all thinking about it. I don’t believe the word Singularity was in common usage then, so Lem didn’t call the world post Singularity, but that is in fact what he was writing about. He envisioned a future where robots have taken over and humans have all but disappeared.

When we say robots, we mean robots in the classic 70s sense: steel and tin, rivets, oil, screws. They worry about rusting and seizing the way today’s humans worry about clogged arteries and cancer of the colon. Modern sf writers usually depict robots as androids and/or cyborgs. Their human/robot of the future will be squishy, soft and proteinaceous. Lem’s robots are robots. They’re hard and lumbering and they look down on the “paleface,” the creatures of albumen that once roamed the galaxy. These robots scoff at the idea that the palefaces actually created the robots. Not possible, they insist. Palefaces are too primitive, stupid, and weak. Not so, counters the robot mythologist who states the true evolution of higher beings is cyclic, with palefaces inventing robots and then robots inventing palefaces and then palefaces inventing robots and so on forever. It’s a sort of religion of the Singularity, one robot’s belief system of where intelligence comes from

Lem’s writing is funny with lots of technical verbiage thrown in for the math majors. It’s clever wand entertaining even if we don’t believe the robots are going to look like this. If you take the book seriously, which if you do, you won’t enjoy it much, you’ll see the robots of the future suffering from the same frailties we suffer from: pettiness, greed, selfishness. It’s as if no matter how you serve up intelligence, it’s not going to be pretty.

Does Lem believe humans will evolve into robots and robots into humans? Who knows but it does give one food for thought when you ask the question where is all this going? The answer doesn’t matter, of course, because we believe what we want to believe and the future takes care of itself.

Sue Lange
Sue Lange’s bookshelf at BookViewCafe.com

Moving toward the No-Carbon Day

When the Singularity comes and we all become robots, we’re going to need a lot of electrical energy to support ourselves. I have total faith in technology and I’m sure the turning-fossils-into-electricity dilemma will be solved long before that day. I envision photovoltaic strips riveted onto the tops of our heads or whatever uppermost structure our post human avatars are usuing. Battery technology will improve to the point where a single molecule of sulfuric acid will be enough to run an entire human hydraulic system for a year. Battery packs will be smaller than a Bluetooth and we’ll wear them like jewelry. A lip or eyebrow ring perhaps.

Until that glorious day comes, however, we’ve got to curb our runaway greenhouse effects and overusage of energy or we’ll never make it. To that end, the March issue of National Geographic had an article on reducing our individual carbon footprints. The article followed a couple of couples as they tracked their personal CO2 emissions. It was an interesting experiment and they did quite well. They lowered their hot water heater thermostats, replaced incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, walked or biked to work when possible instead of driving, and took the bus otherwise, used ceiling fans instead of AC.

All good stuff. The biggest problem one couple had was when they took a trip. They were doing well up until the point when they simply had to attend a family function. Here’s how they justified it: “I knew this trip wasn’t going to help our carbon diet any. But what was more important after all, reducing CO2 emissions or sharing a family celebration?”

The implication, of course, is that nothing supercedes family obligations. World be damned, I’ve got a reunion. They may very well be right but it points out the biggest problem we have when trying to solve our environmental crises: The world is no longer working in a logical way. We’re expected to put the family before all else, but at the same time, we’re supposed to put our jobs and careers ahead of the family. Why else do we move so far away from the family in the first place? If the family is so damned important, why don’t the family members stick together regardless of “opportunities” elsewhere?

It’s these inconsistencies in our lives and our easy acceptance of these inconsistencies that prevent us from making ecological progress. I mean, is the family important or isn’t it? If it isn’t, fine don’t make the trip, you can’t afford the cost to the environment. If it is important, then stick around, you’ll never have to travel very far and it won’t cost so much carbon-wise. In fact, don’t move out of the ancestral home at all. When needing that familial nurturing, you just walk across the hall, holler at Mom, Dad, and Sis to wake the eff up and there you are. No gas spent, no nasty CO2 added to the atmosphere. Another no-carbon day.