Over the past few years I’ve been thinking about whole brain emulation (WBE) and the required computational resources. My conclusion is that the required technology level will be reached in the 2025 – 2030 time frame.
Although most estimates focus on calculations per second, the relevant parameters are:
Missed Eliezer Yudkowsky: Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism.
9:40 – Ramez Naam: The Digital Biome
Plenty of carrying capacity for the biome – 30-300 billion people with advanced biotech. We are using only 1/1000 of the incident energy from the sun. There’s no reason to crash due to lack of resources with advanced tech. Population is predicted to level off at 10 billion.
Good points, but the Singularity is likely to happen on a shorter time scale.
9:30 – Missed Michael Vassar‘s talk.
9:50 – Gregory Stock is talking. He is skeptical about progress in the bio realm. He says that the FDA is a damper on progress, but he also says that there are difficult problems. He brings up Alzheimer’s as an example. I think he is underestimating the power of info tech to change the way we do bio-science. Having read/write access to DNA, plus “in-silico” simulations will change the game.
Now he is talking about Silicon and saying that the complexity of computers rivals that of life. And now he is talking about the rapid exponential progress in DNA technology. As far as I understand, he is worried that we will create new life forms that will supersede humans. He is saying that human evolution is “not exponential”. I think he means that it’s a very slow exponential compared to tech.
Martin talks about the future of the cosmos and our responsibility to prevent existential risks at a long now foundation seminar.
Nice to see H+ memes coming from the president of the Royal Society.
H/T Tom McCabe @ Kurzweil AI
Raghavendra Singh and Dharmendra S Modha published a paper in PNAS detailing 383 brain regions and 6,602 connections between them.
A very insightful talk about how we lost our freedom and how to regain it
You can also read the full transcript linked from there.
Here are some background pointers:
A list of projects in this space. The Diaspora project is listed under “deployable on commodity webhosting”. I was under the impression that they are actually more of a p2p application.
A set of ideas for this space on the GNU Social wiki.
Adriana Lukas talks about the user-controlled web and the mine project. (She coins a fun acronym: Relationships on Individuals’ Own Terms - RIOT. )
There seems to be quite a bit of activity with 20-30 projects, but the efforts are fragmented. Different projects have different goals and approaches. Some focus on a piece of the user experience and others focus on technology. For example, the Mine! project is a technology piece focused on rich sharing of data (including links, photos) with strong user control. OneSocialWeb is focused on messaging. With Elgg you can create social networks – but it’s not really user controlled.
Diversity is great, but one or two well-thought out efforts need to win. Critical mass is a must in order to win in this space.
I’m pretty excited about the Diaspora project generating a groundswell of support. They managed to raise $170K in two weeks through kickstarter (they asked for $10K).
Why am I excited? I’ve written before about walled gardens and user controlled Internet apps. It is crucial that we invert the control structure of the web if we want to be in control of our destiny.
There are some critical challenges that a user-controlled system must face:
I can’t wait to see what the first prototype looks like.
There are some additional projects along these lines that are worth a look and are actually further along:
Maybe none of these will make it. But the $170K is a signal – that people care about this.
Tihamer Toth-Fejel writes about Productive Nanosystems and the 2009 Financial Meltdown.
The collisions between unstoppable juggernauts and immovable obstacles are always fascinating—we just cannot tear our eyes away from the immense conflict, especially if we have a glimmer of the immense consequences it will have for us. So it will be when Productive Nanosystems emerge from the global financial meltdown. To predict what will happen in the next decade or so, we must understand the essential nature of wealth, and we must understand the capabilities of productive nanosystems.
Sanity prevails in federal court! News at 11.
As a Cryonics member, I became interested in a new initiative to fixate the brain in a plastic medium: brainpreservation.org
Would be excellent to have a high fidelity preservation procedure that doesn’t require maintenance (such as liquid nitrogen in the case of Cryonics).
After attending a couple of Quantified Self meetups, I was inspired to quantify various aspects of myself and my life. For example, I was wondering if I am breathing well while I sleep, since I have been waking up tired on occasion.
I bought the Contec CMS50-F oximeter from here.
The software that comes with the CMS50 could be more reliable and user-friendly, and only runs on Windows. I ended up spending a day reverse engineering the USB protocol and writing a Python program to acquire and graph the data. The software is on Gitorious.
Here are some of the charts you can get:
Noah Hutton’s company Couple 3 Films has released year 1 of a 10 year documentary project documenting the Blue Brain project. The project includes Henry Markham’s work on reverse engineering the brain, scaling up from rodents to humans by 2010.
The work is funded by the Swiss government.
Life Technologies announces $3,000 marginal cost (later this year) for sequencing complete human genomes. This is after Illumina announced the same for $10,000 (now). So a $1,000 genome early next year?
Here comes personalized medicine.
I’ve been asked to outline specific scenarios after I posted a previous entry on the Google’s network compromise. Here are some, from most serious to least serious:
How would multiple independent auditors help? If the auditors can verify that a binary was produced from certain source, the build host compromise would be much harder, since the altered binary would not signed by the uncompromised auditors. Similarly, a signing key compromise, if it is limited to a subset of auditors, would fail to get a full set of signatures on the altered package.
Source repository compromise and Insider injection of security holes would be more difficult to detect for subtle exploits, but again, multiple entities looking at the code increases the chances that the alteration would be caught.
(Note: verification that a certain binary was produced from certain source code requires a deterministic build system. Although such a system is relatively straightforward to implement, I have not run across one before I implemented Gitian. I did find mention of it by Conifer Systems.)
CNet reports on Ponemon institute’s survey showing a doubling of data breach incidents.
Average cost per record in the surveyed group is around $200.
Operation Aurora (Google’s compromise by China) highlights the possibility that software distributions may be targeted for code injection by malicious parties. If Apple, Microsoft or a linux distributors are compromised, a large percentage of individuals, businesses and governments could be consequentially compromised when they install software updates.
One way to mitigate such a risk is to have multiple independent security auditors sign software distributions. This is more likely to be successful in an open-source environment, where source is available and can easily be inspected. I started such an initiative in late 2009 – Gitian.org.
Henry Markham calls IBM’s cat scale brain simulation a hoax. Markham claims that the simulation doesn’t have the 10,000+ differential equations needed to simulate the synapses with fidelity. This argument is a version of the naturalistic fallacy – if Nature requires X to achieve a result, we will have to perform X when replicating the effect.
It is useful to think about the simulation’s level of detail (LOD) in terms of certain thresholds, from most detailed to least detailed:
The computation power required for LODn > LODf > LODe. There are likely order of magnitude differences between the levels.
If we consider a non-biological example – a digital computer, what does it take to simulate it? It is obviously enough to simulate the logic function. The Markham’s line of reasoning would seem to argue that we have to simulate the voltage gradients and charge movements in each transistor!
In the transistor case, LODn would involve simulating each transistor’s logic function. LODf would involve an instruction set simulation (e.g. the QEMU emulator). LODe would involve using the most convenient instruction set (e.g. x86) and recompiling any software. Clearly, an LODe simulation is several orders of magnitude more efficient.
Markham fails to convince that his preferred level of simulation is required for LODn, never mind the other levels.
One way to find out what levels require is to actually run simulations and compare to physical neural matter. The Blue Brain project aims to do that, although the results are not conclusive yet. It would be good if more research was directed at comparing their simulation to a biological brain. This would make the project more grounded.
Alex and I got nasal H1N1 vaccines on Tue. I felt tired on Wed and Alex has a sore throat. Nasal is live-attenuated instead of dead virus.
Apparently symptoms are more likely with the nasal. On the up-side – no preservatives!
No, the nasal-spray flu vaccine LAIV (FluMist) does not contain thimerosal or any other preservative.
The Register tells us that Amazon will auction their excess capacity. We’re a couple of steps away from computation becoming a liquid commodity. The next step is for a couple of additional providers to arise (Google?). The step after that is for the APIs to be brought in sync by the providers or by a third party intermediary.