Isn’t graphene even more fun? Carbon chainmail

Thought for the day:

Graphene, picture from cnx.org

 

A Chainmail structure, picture from 123rf.com

It’s a bit easier to see how the links overlap in this pic:

 

pic from mediafocus.com

So, just thinking out loud, perhaps the rings in the chainmail above could be rings of carbon, just 6 atoms each. If so, would this be better than graphene at anything useful, or not? Would longer rings work better? The idea of carbon nanotube chainmail is about a decade old.

 

Powerpoint really is not designed as a proper drawing tool and not having a week to spare, I didn’t bother doing the link overlaps or even the bonds properly in my pic, but together with the other two, I think you will get the idea fine.

I don’t know if this will work or not, but it might be an idea worth looking at further.

 

 

 

The rise and fall of the web

This is my part of a joint newsletter with Rohit Talwar, his was published just now as a guest blog.

The rise and fall of the web

20 years ago, the web was in its infancy and the first conferences appeared where we could all discuss what was coming next. Even then the need was obvious for search engines, portal sites, firewalls, social networking, online shopping, auctions, discount buying schemes and so on and even the seedier side of the web was already obvious back then. Not much around today on the web wasn’t being discussed 20 years ago. It just took that long to emerge and evolve into what was anticipated. What has happened is exposure of the naïve optimism of some of the early debate.

Over the coming years we saw the expected creation of companies like Amazon and ebay, Facebook, Twitter and Google, and the rise of already existing companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Samsung, in some cases from niche player to market dominance. Without exception, the companies I mentioned deserve praise for struggling through the difficult phases of market creation and the sometimes huge and prolonged losses leading up to break-even and eventual profitability. They all started with a dream and made it happen, knowing they would succeed if they worked hard enough at it.

Without wanting to remove any of that praise, it is hard not to wonder if at least part of the dream is starting to turn sour. Is there evidence now that power corrupts? Does possession of a strong market position always lead inevitably to market abuse?

In each case, there are recent examples of less-than-saintly behaviour, but some issues are spreading as a problem, so rather than pick on individual companies, I’ll focus on the issues. In each case, a large company with little effective competition is in strong position to force these policies since they know customers and clients can’t easily just walk away. There is no cartel, but if a problem happens to affect all the main providers for a service, or it is a de-facto monopoly, you really have no choice.

Privacy invasion or at least scant regard for privacy is the biggest issue for some, introducing policies that make it hard for users to remain private. In this case, the reason is obvious. Privacy conflicts with extracting maximum market value from a customer’s personal data. I don’t personally want everyone to know what I just bought online, what I watch on TV, what games I play or what music I am listening to, or to have full access to everything I ever typed on a social networking page. The choice we seem to be presented with is simple. If you don’t want to be fully exposed 24-7, either don’t use the web or a mobile app, or be prepared to spend time frequently to check every site you use carefully for their latest policy changes to make sure an oversight doesn’t allow your privacy doesn’t fall through a new hole they just dug. But even that may not be the real choice now. The emerging pattern seem to be that changes may be introduced retrospectively, eradicating any value in privacy commitments in existing policy. If that behaviour spreads, then any privacy you think you have today is merely an illusion.

Burning the candle at both ends is another recent issue. Although the web has few of the costs associated the with high street, large web companies are charging high fees now to companies to sell via their site, much the same as property developers with the best locations can charge high fees to shops. That end of the candle is well alight, but customers are finding the discounts offered are often far less now too. Now that they have been psychologically hooked by the web empires, prices are rising.

Walled gardens were a consideration for regulators when mobile and broadband networks were emerging – I took part in several workshops discussing their merits and drawbacks. Telecoms regulators understood well that dominant telecoms companies might try to force customers to use only services within their own areas of control, i.e. to stay in their walled garden, and they legislated accordingly to protect customers. It was presumed that competition would suffer greatly if people were not free to wander as they pleased and exploitation would follow soon after.  However, although some of the web giants are heading rapidly and determinedly down exactly that path, the authorities are either looking the other direction or unable to do anything about it. It seems that any regulators that do exist have too vague boundaries on their remits, or the companies fall outside their jurisdiction geographically, or they simply have too many issues to deal with and can’t keep up. It is unacceptable that we now by default have arrived at a business platform that lends itself to abuse but isn’t being properly controlled by the normal regulator processes that apply as standard elsewhere.

Arrogance is a term we hear thrown at web giants frequently now, and it does seem appropriate when a large company ignores protests by its customers and imposes policies that significantly affect the terms and conditions that applied when they first became a customer. Even incrementally small changes can add up to large change in a short time, but if customers have invested time and effort building a profile or establishing a place or network on a site, the personal costs of migration can be too high. There ought to be equivalent rights protecting the interests of customers online just as in the physical world, but online providers appear to be able to make their own conditions of use with much greater scope for abuses, knowing that very few customers will read many pages of small print. Especially where websites feature heavily in everyday use, and where not being a user might even may be a career or social impediment, there should be more protection from arrogance and unilateral determination and management of user rights. Some regulatory body should be making sure terms and conditions are fair and balanced because the market isn’t doing that by itself.

Another aspect of arrogance is the enthusiasm to avoid taxes by exploiting holes in the law, and reading between the lines, it is as if the companies think they know best how money should be spent for humankind’s best interests, not governments. They may be right about government, but that doesn’t excuse arrogance.

Reintermediation is a direct consequence of walled gardens but is an issue in its own right. Early analysis of the web suggested it would lead to perfect markets, where people would be in direct contact with suppliers, thereby cutting out the middle man and his costs while forcing perfect information and hence maximum competitiveness. With good search, it would be easy to find all potential suppliers for something and compare them directly, and there would be no need to go via an agency. What we have now is interesting in that the search sites have themselves become intermediaries, and comparison sites another layer of that, listing results from a subset of suppliers. So instead of removing an intermediary we generated two new ones, three if you use an app store to do it. Everyone wants a slice of the pie of course, but the web was meant to bypass that, and it simply hasn’t. People can go direct, but it doesn’t take long to discover that using a search engine will often put hundreds of pages of the wrong sites before the one you search for. Most of the listings on the first several pages will often be intermediary sites.

In spite of all this, the potential of the web hasn’t gone away. It still allows word of new sites to spread rapidly, for reputations to be made and lost, for empires to spring up overnight, and for old ones to crash and burn. Boredom is under-rated as a motivation to change too. Social network sites in particular are highly vulnerable to their customers simply getting bored and leaving, but new designs and novel ideas can present a real threat to any of them. The sword of Damocles hangs over all.

For all their size and momentum, none of the web giants is guaranteed longevity. As some of yesterday’s giants discovered, a startup can replace them in just a few years. Maybe the first generation of web giants has climbed high, but decadence and abuse of power have made them ripe for conquest. All we need now is to wait for the imminent emergence of the second generation.

Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan? Guest post by Rohit Talwar

Rohit is CEO of Fastfuture and a long-standing friend as well as an excellent futurist. He and I used to do a joint newsletter, and we have started again. Rohit sends it out to his mailing list as a proper newletter and because I don’t use mailing lists, I guest post it here. I’ll post my bit immediately after this one. I’m especially impressed since his bit ticks almost as many filing category boxes as it uses words.

Here is Rohit’s piece:

Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan?

I have just returned from South Korea where I was delivering a keynote speech to a cross-industry forum on how to prepare for and benefit from the opportunities arising from industry convergence. South Korea has made a major strategic commitment starting with government and running through the economy to be a leader in exploiting the potential opportunities arising from the convergence of industries made possible by advances in a range of disciplines. These include information and communications technology, biological and genetic sciences, energy and environmental sciences, cognitive science, materials science and nanotechnology.  From environmental monitoring, smart cars, and intelligent grids through to adaptive bioengineered materials and clothing-embedded wearable sensor device that monitor our health on a continuous basis – the potential is vast.

What struck me about the situation in Korea was how the opportunity is being viewed as a central component of the long-term future of Korea’s economy and how this is manifested in practice. Alongside a national plan, a government sponsored association has been established to drive and facilitate cross-industry collaboration to achieve convergence. In addition to various government-led support initiatives, a range of conferences are being created to help every major sector of the economy understand, explore, act on and realise the potential arising out of convergence.

I am fortunate to get the opportunity to visit 20-25 countries a year across all six continents and get to study and see a lot of what is happening to create tomorrow’s economy. Whilst my perspective is by no means complete, I am not aware of any country where such a systematic and rigorous approach is being taken to driving industry convergence. Those who study Korea know that this approach is nothing new for them – long term research and strategic planning are acknowledged to have played a major role in the evolution of its knowledge economy and rise of Korea and its technology brands on the global stage. Coming from the UK, where it seems that long term thinking and national policy are now long lost relatives, I wonder why it is that so few countries are willing to or capable of taking such a strategic approach.

Rohit on the Road

In the next few months Rohit will delivering speeches in Oslo, Paris, Vilnius, Warsaw, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Denver, Las Vegas, Oman, Leeds and London. Topics to be covered include human enhancement, the future of professional services, the future of HR, transformational forces in business, global drivers of change, how smart businesses create the future, the future technology timeline, the future of travel and tourism, the future of airlines and airports and the future of education. If you would like to arrange a meeting with Rohit in one of these cities or are interested in arranging a presentation or workshop for your organisation, please contact rohit@fastfuture.com

Towards the singularity

This piece was originally written a year ago for ACM proceedings but got lost in their review process, so rather than waste it, here it is before it passes its use-by date. A recent powerpoint presentation highlighting the potential of the singularity but setting that against some of the dangers that we may instead be dragged into a dark age is here.

http://futurizon.com/articles/singularitydarkage.pdf

Anyway, here is my article:

Towards the singularity

About 25 years ago, inspired by the invention of field programmable gate arrays, many engineers recognised that in principle these could be used as the basis of an evolving machine, using a biomimetic approach.  Starting with an array of FPGA-like machines and evolutionary algorithms, clearly the hardware would be able to evolve to its physical limits. It wasn’t long after that before the first simple evolving software and then hardware was achieved. The early 90s saw an explosion in evolutionary development, with evolutionary software as the prime focus due to low range of reconfigurable circuitry. While evolutionary computing got bogged down in biomimetic integrity and genetic algorithms, those of us engineers with futurist mindsets looked towards the far end of the development wedge. We saw that positive feedback across the wider science and technology R&D system would cause development eventually to race ahead of Moore’s Law, as smarter machines enabled faster development and faster discovery in every field. What we now call the singularity is a simple extrapolation of ongoing positive feedback in technology development.

We know that evolution works in nature, and have already proved that we don’t have to fully understand stuff to develop it, just point it in vaguely the right direction and let it evolve and find its own way. Whether via evolution or design, computers will eventually surpass human intelligence, amplify positive feedback still further, and that will lead to the extremely rapid invention with the familiar almost vertical development curve. That is inevitable. Even without evolutionary computing, the singularity will still come, but will be slower, since it would be limited by human knowledge, squandering the potential contribution of machine assistance.

The singularity initially is appealing, inspiring visions of potential technotopia, and the potential would be real if mankind was ready to deal with it, but problems are starting to show through and realisation of them and the consequential actions will slow it down.

Firstly, invention is only the first stage of development, and there are limits on how fast physical development can take place, even with all the self-replicating machines we may expect, however smart they get. So the way the singularity manifests itself at best will be as a rapidly growing gap between creativity and realisation. It will be as if advanced ETs had landed and given us a manual on how to build all their technology. But we still wouldn’t be able to have it all instantly and would have to decide on a priority list.

This isn’t just a theoretical problem. We already have a large creativity gap (i.e., the pile of spare inventions that have been thought up but haven’t yet been developed) – and that indicates that the impact of the singularity will be restricted. If you go to the R&D department of any large technology company, you will find a huge pool of ideas backed by a relatively small pot of funding. Most engineers will be familiar with the frustration of brainstorms where most of the ideas they scribble on post-its get thrown away. Ideas are two a penny even today, but only so many can be developed. If the singularity is to have any real economic significance, it needs to be about more than just quantity of ideas. Even an infinite creativity gap isn’t valuable per se; it needs to be about quality and purpose too. By focusing on the near vertical invention curve, perhaps we miss the point. If you are offered anything you want this afternoon, you still need to ask yourself what it is you want, and that introduces another hurdle to jump over. Clearly, while humans control the allocation of resources and permission to build things, we will hold back development to our human imagination and cultural limits. The singularity could theoretically arrive around 2025, but the practical implications of it will arrive much more slowly.

Secondly, the decisions on what to build depend on our economic culture. In a pure capitalist system, if a new technology allows cheap automation, fewer employees will be needed, and wealth moves towards capital owners. While new jobs are created sufficient quickly, this is just a retraining issue and the economy as a whole can grow, but when automation exceeds the rate at which new jobs can be created, it becomes a problem. If too few people have enough money to buy output, demand falls and the economy spirals downwards. Consequently, many people are already looking at new designs for capitalism to make it economically and socially sustainable (environmentally sustainability is moving quickly towards third place). We don’t have to wait for the singularity; again, signs of this downward spiral are already starting to appear.

In a world eager for the next pad, it is easy to be enthused about future technology if your future income is secure. As technology catches up with human intelligence and even people in well-paid professional jobs start to be replaced, it is easy also to imagine a backlash building, especially if new technologies are used to increase government control of our lives, as they often are. The potential backlash would build until politicians are forced to deal with it, one way or another. Capitalism can’t properly exploit the singularity in its current form, and will have to be redesigned. But how? It will take time to decide.

Thirdly, the singularity presents many existential threats and thereby another reason to force powerful restrictions on scope and rate of development. These could and may well force very different development paths and delay it very significantly, perhaps by decades. It is likely that the military will want to push for powerful new weapons, but a singularity-based arms race could tip the balance rapidly and greatly increase temptation for first strike action. Laser and plasma rifles already exist, at least in experimental form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Star). Terawatt solar wind deflector ray-guns and zombie viruses are within the scope of the 2025 singularity technology (http://futurizon.com/articles/madscientists.pdf). Many more can be listed. Starting with only six known ways that life on earth could be wiped out back in 2000 (nearby supernova, major solar storm, asteroid or comet strike, GM accident, or global nuclear war), my own studies suggest that the number increases exponentially to over 100 by 2050. If each optimistically has a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring in a single year by accident or deliberate action, the probability of extinction rises to 1% per annum and continues to grow exponentially. Do the sums and you end up with an ETA for extinction of 2085, hardly the technotopian future promised by the singularity up front. To avoid such a result, we will be forced to intervene. But how? At the very least we need more time.

Fourthly, we are becoming more and more vulnerable. In a world containing many people who wish to harm us, our dependence on highly complex technology systems is already a significant known military risk, as well as social and economic. Asymmetry is the key word here. But it isn’t just deliberate harm we need to worry about. Recently, solar storms brought our dependency problem into sharp focus. We no longer have the old systems as a backup, nor even people who knew how they worked. As we engineer in ever more complexity and systemic interdependence, we surely build our prosperity on sand. A failure of any part of our critical systems for any reason could quickly lead to cascade failures, and riots for the last bottles of water. Before we rush to grab hold of the singularity, we need first to get a hold of failsafe design and the practice of keeping a backup, not just for our computers but for our whole life support system. I don’t worry about complexity or whether I understand how the system works. I worry about how I and my family will manage when it fails.  But complexity isn’t the only vulnerability.

One of the well-known scenarios that results from all of this is the Terminator scenario, and I am not convinced at all that we have solved this problem yet. (For the uninitiated, the Terminator Scenario is thus called after the Terminator series of film. In this series, the US military develops a powerful satellite-based computer system called Skynet to control their missiles so that they could respond faster to a threat, but the computer system achieves consciousness, decides that humans are actually the threat, and sets about wiping out humanity).  Machines already do most of the design work on the next generation machines. Human engineers make some of the key decisions and tell the machines what to design, mostly, but the proportion of human input is falling. Particularly when we use evolutionary design, the human understanding of the technology that results can be very low indeed. Imagine a scenario where a few smart students plan a prank, and use an off-the-net virus pack to infect millions of machines with an algorithm. The algorithm is very crude but attempts to achieve elements of consciousness or thinking, just for fun, to see what happens, to see how far they can get. Some of the students are in IT, some from bio-tech and nano-tech, some from neuroscience, and a few others. The algorithms are crude but designed as well as they can, using all their latest knowledge of how the neural networks in the brain work. And so they spawn them, on a million machines, each with 1% of the raw processing power of the human brain. And they use evolution in that huge aggregated processing pot to experiment with variants of the algorithm. Over time, the system accumulates a toolbox of different algorithms and circuits that achieve a wide variety of neural functions to some degree to achieve key components of mind or consciousness or awareness. By experimenting with automatically linking these together in many combinations, the students hope to achieve larger and larger degrees of AI. And they might as well harness that AI to refine the evolutionary algorithms too, and make the virus better at infecting even more machines and adapting better, and hiding better. All automatically. Can we be sure that such a prank would always fail? Or could it work, and achieve consciousness in a distributed machine, just like the Skynet from Terminator?

But if you go to singularity timeframes, there are even further dangers. Some people already belong to hobbyist genetic engineering groups or play with 3d printing – and some of those mess with printing electronics too. Circuits can harvest energy from changes in the environment or passing radio waves and so won’t necessarily need batteries. People will try to push the boundaries via those routes too and 2025 is a good way off so lots of progress will occur in all these fields by then. With feedback among all these bio-nano-info-cogno technologies, it is not hard to imagine how students or a terrorist group could make good progress even without proper funding, even while staying anonymous, based anywhere. As hidden net-based programs become smarter and more autonomous, they could notionally get to the point where they interact with genetic assemblers and printers and design biological and electronic devices in a feedback loop. When thinking of a grey goo scenario, forget little micro-mechanical machines. Think bacteria, think GM assemblers, think AI-led environmental adaptation and think of a distributed organism that is part in the machine world and part in the ecosystem. Much of that is achievable long before we get the singularity and the rest very soon after. Transhumanists forget that transbacteria may not allow them to proceed. Smart bacteria may link together into super-smart organisms that think of humans merely as competition for resources. We could be building the engines of our own destruction, even while aiming for technotopia.

I am no doom monger, and I always manage to convince myself that we will muddle through. Sure, we’ll do it badly and get half of the benefit at twice the price and twice the mess. We already know the problems above. They are being addressed in organisations such as the Lifeboat Foundation, there are often conferences or symposia along singularity lines. Government is even starting to react. Studies covering NBIC (nano, bio, info, cogno) convergence issues were initiated by the EU before 2000. The US and Canadian governments have bother run conferences debating ways that mad scientists could use future technologies to cause great harm. So the problems won’t come unexpectedly. Where do we end up?

The problems above are possibilities and even likely if we take the default path of ongoing unfettered development. Positive feedback would deliver on some of the promises, and some of the problems would appear along the way. In the real world, it won’t happen like that. Social and political feedback loops, educated by many ongoing debates such as this symposium, will ensure that regulation is implemented that slows it down, restricting what can legally be done, what can be developed, what can be bought, and by whom. It has to. What we can also be sure of is that much of the regulation will be reactive and badly thought out. So it will be a mess, we will barely muddle through, but muddle through we will. What we can hope for is that it might be a relatively safe mess and the reward at the end is worth it. But let’s start by acknowledging that what we call the singularity is only a theoretical concept, and it can’t be achieved in its pure form. The real world development path will surely be very different, constrained and forced down different paths by physical, cultural and economic limits and forced to comply with a wide range of legal precautions.

Vampires are yesterday, zombies will peak soon, then clouds are coming

Most things that you can imagine have been the subject of sci-fi or fantasy at some point. There is certainly a large fashion element in the decision what to make the next film about and it is fun trying to spot what will come next.

Witches went out of fashion a decade ago even while other sword and sorcery, dungeons and dragons stuff remained stable and recurrent, albeit a niche. Vampires and werewolves accounted for far too many films and became boring, though admittedly, some of them were very good fun, so it’s safe to bury them for a decade or hopefully two.

Zombies are among the current leaders, (as I predicted several years ago, in spite of being laughed at back then). It is still hard to find a computer game that doesn’t have some sort of zombies in it, so they have a good while to go yet. The zombie apocalypse is scientifically and technologically feasible (see http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/zombies-are-coming/) and that makes them far more disturbing than vampires and dragons, though the parasites in Alien are arguably even scarier.

Star Trek and the Terminator series introduced us to shape shifters. Avatar and Star Trek enthused over futuristic Indians. Symbionts and proxies are interesting but that’s really quite a shallow seam, there is really only one idea and it’s been used already. Religion and New Age trash has generally polluted throughout sci-fi and fantasy, but people are getting tired of it – American Indians and Australian Aborigines have been apologised to now. Recent Muslim backlash however suggests that the days are numbered for Star Wars, Dune, Mk 1 Klingons and others tapping into middle eastern stereotypes, so maybe  that will force other exotic cultures into the sci-fi limelight. The Cold War has already been done in overdose. South America has already been fully mined too. It’s a good while since the Chinese and Japanese cultures had a decent turn and I suspect they will come back strongly soon, whereas Africa doesn’t hold enough cultural identification points yet. Homophilia is having recurrent effects from Star Wars to Dr Who, but apart from gender-hopping, there isn’t really very far it can go. You can’t make many films from it.

So if those are the areas that are already showing signs of exhaustion  what comes after zombies? Gay zombies? Chinese zombies? Virtual zombies? Time travel zombies? Yeah, but after that?

Here’s my guess. Clouds.

Clouds are the IT Zeitgeist. They are the mid term future for sci-fi. There are a few possible manifestations and some tap well into other things we are getting to like. Clouds are a deep seam too. Not just one idea there. We have self-organisation, distribution, virtualisation, hybridisation, miniaturisation, self-replication, adaptation and evolution. We have AI, biomimetics, symbiosis, parasitic and commensalistic relationships. We have new kinds of gender, new kinds of intelligence, new physical and electronic forms. We have new kinds of materials, new ways of reproduction, new forms of attack and defense. I could write dozens of sci-fi books based on clouds. So could other people, and some of them will. Books, games, films, lots of them. About clouds.

You heard it here first. Clouds are the future of sci-fi.

 

Future population v resources. Humans are not a plague.

Sir David Attenborough is once again in the news, arguing that humans are a plague on the earth. He has been an excellent presenter over the years, but he does himself no favours by making such claims. Doomsayers are invariably wrong. I’ve written a few times about this, but here’s a quick refresher to save you looking them up.

Let’s get rid of a silly straw man before we start – exponential growth continuing forever. Nobody sane think the Earth’s human population will carry on increasing exponentially forever. Obviously it will level off. Exponential growth all the way to infinity isn’t sustainable, but since the population will level off around 10 billion, we really don’t need to spend too much time worrying about the mathematics of infinite consumption. I would personally put the maximum capacity of the Earth at around 100 billion, but I don’t expect us ever to have more than 10 billion here, and nobody sensible does. Other planets will house some more, but they will have their own economics.

First, we aren’t running out of physical resources, just moving them around. Apart from a few spacecraft that have moves some stuff off planet, some excess radioactive decay induced in power stations and weapons, and helium and hydrogen escaping from the atmosphere, all of which is offset by meteorites and dust landing from space, all we have done is convert stuff to other forms. Almost all materials are more plentiful now than they were 40 years ago when Sir David’s predecessors warned of the world running out imminently. They were wrong, so is he. If we do start to run short, we can mine key elements from rubbish tips and use energy to convert back to any form we need. We can engineer substitutes  And we can gather them from space. Another way of looking at this issue is that we live on top of 6000km of resources and only have homes a few metres deep. When we fill them, which doesn’t take much, we dispose of one thing to make room for a new one. Recycling technology is getting better all the time, at the same time as material technology means we need less stuff to make something, and can do so with a wider range of input elements.

We are slowly depleting some organic resources. For example, fossil fuels, but there are several hundred years supply left, and we will not need any more than a tiny fraction of that before we move to other energy sources. Also, fish, many stocks are threatened around the world, so fishing needs some work in designing and implementing better practices, but that is not unachievable by any means. Forestry is being depleted in some areas and expanding in others. Some of the areas that are being wiped out are because environmentalists and other doomsayers have forced daft policies through that perversely encourage people to burn forests down to make the land available for biofuel plantations and carbon offset schemes.

We certainly are not short of space. If the inhabitable land in the world were inhabited at the same density as southern England, we could house 70-80 billion people. The UK sometimes feels full when we get stuck in traffic jams or queues for public services, but these are mainly a matter of design. Self driving vehicles can increase road capacity by a factor of 5, regional rail capacity by a factor of 200. Replacement of most public sector workers by machines, or better still, good system design, would eradicate most queues and improve most services.

Energy isn’t a problem in the long term in spite of what doomsayers claim. Shale gas is already reducing costs in the USA at the same time as reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In Europe, where doomsayers and environmentalist have more power to influence policy, CO2 emissions are increasing while energy costs threaten many areas of the economy. Obama’s recent speech threatens to undermine the USA’s advantage but that’s another story. Nuclear energy currently depends on uranium  but thorium based power is under development and is very likely to succeed in due course, adding several hundred years of supply. Solar, fusion, geothermal and shale gas will add to this to provide abundant power for even a much great population, within a few decades, well ahead of the population curve. The only energy shortages we will see will be doomsayer-induced.

Future generations will face debts handed on to them without their consent, but will also inherit a physical and cultural infrastructure with built in positive feedback that ensure rapid technological development. Among its many benefits, future technology will greatly reduce the amount of material needed to accomplish a task. It will also expand the global economy to provide enough wealth to buy a decent standards of living for everyone. It will also clean up the environment  It will also produce far more food from less land area, allowing land to be returned to nature. Food production per hectare has doubled in the last 30 years. The technology promises further gains  into the foreseeable future.

The world Attenborough is scared of will actually be a greener and more pleasant land, with nature in a better state than today, with a larger world population that is richer and better fed, almost certainly no more than 10 billion. Providing that is, that we can stop doomsayers forcing their policies through – the only thing that would really wreck the environment. A doomsayer-free human population is not a plague but a benefit to the Earth and nature. The doomsayers themselves and their daft policies are the greatest proven threat. If Sir David really cares about nature, he should focus on letting us be inspired by nature as he does so brilliantly, and let technologists get on with making sure it can flourish in the future

 

 

When will AI marriage become legal?

Gay marriage is so yesterday. OK, it isn’t quite yet, but everything has been said a million times and I don’t intend to repeat it. A related but much more interesting debate is already gathering volume globally. When will you be able to marry your robot or AI?

The traditional Oxford English definition of marriage:

The formal union of a man and a woman, typically recognized by law, by which they become husband and wife. 

But, as is being asked by some, who says they have to be a man and a woman? Why can’t they be any sex? I don’t want to get into the arguments, because people on both sides argue passionately, often flying in the face of logic, but here is a gender neutral alternative definition:

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people called spouses that establishes rights and obligations between the spouses, between the spouses and their children, and between the spouses and their in-laws.

Well, I am all for equality for all, but who says they have to be people?

If we are going to fight over definitions, surely we should try to finish with one that might survive more than a decade or two. This one simply won’t.

Artificial intelligence, or AI as it is usually called now, is making good progress. We already have computers with more raw number crunching power than the human brain. Their software, and indeed their requirement to use software, makes them far from equivalent overall, but I don’t think we will be waiting very long now for AI machines that we will agree are conscious, self aware, intelligent, sentient, with emotions, capable of forming human-like relationships. A few cranks will still object maybe, but so what?

These AIs will likely be based on adaptive analog neural networks rather than digital processing so they will not be so different from us really. Different futurists list different dates for AIs with man-machine equivalence, depending mostly on the prejudices and experiences bequeathed by their own backgrounds. I’d say 10 years, some say 15 or 20. Some say we will never get there, but they are just wrong, so wrong. We will soon have artificially intelligent entities comparable to humans in intellect and emotional capability. So how about this definition? :

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between conscious entities called spouses that establishes rights and obligations between the spouses, between the spouses and their derivatives, and those legally connected to them.

An AI might or might not be connected to a robot. An AI may not have any permanent physical form, and robots are really a red herring here. The mind is what is surely important, not the container. An AI can still be an entity that lives for a long enough time to be eligible for a long term relationship. I often watch sci-fi or play computer games, and many have AI characters that take on some sort of avatar – Edi in Mass Effect or Cortana in Halo for example. Sometimes these avatars are made to look very attractive, even super-attractive. It is easy to imaging how someone could fall in love with their AI. It isn’t much harder to imagine that they could fall in love with each other.

It’s a while since I last wrote about machine consciousness so I’ll say how I think it will work again now.

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/gel-computing/ tells of my ideas on gel computing. A lot of adaptive electronic devices suspended in gel that can set up free space optical links to each other would be an excellent way of making an artificial brain-like processor.

Using this as a base, and with each of the tiny capsules being able to perform calculations, an extremely powerful digital processor could be created. But I don’t believe digital processors can become conscious, however much their processing increases in speed. It is an act of faith I guess, I can’t prove it, but coming from a computer modelling background it seems to me that a digital computer can simulate the processes in consciousness but it can’t emulate them and that difference is crucial.

I firmly believe consciousness is a matter of internal sensing. The same way that you sense sound or images or touch, you can sense the processes based on those same neural functions and their derivatives in your brain. Emotions ditto. We make ideas and concepts out of words and images and sounds and other sensory things and emotions too. We regenerate the same sorts of patterns, and filter them similarly to create new knowledge, thoughts and memories, a sort of vortex of sensory stimuli and echoes. Consciousness might not actually just be internal sensing, we don’t know yet exactly how it works, but even if it isn’t, you could do it that way. Internal sensing can be the basis of a conscious machine, an AI. Here’s a picture. This would work. I am sure of it. There will also be other ways of achieving consciousness, and they might have different flavours. But for the purposes of arguing for AI marriage, we only need one method of achieving consciousness to be feasible.

I think this sort of AI design could work and it would certainly be capable of emotions. In fact, it would be capable of a much wider range of emotions than human experience. I believe it could fall in love, with a human, alien, or another AI. AIs will have a range and variety of gender capabilities and characteristics. People will be able to link to them in new ways, creating new forms of intimacy. The same technology will also enable new genders for people too, as I discussed recently. In the long term view, gay marriage is just another point on a long line.

When we set aside the arguing over gender equality, what we usually agree on is the importance of love. People can fall in love with any other human of any age, race or gender, but they are also capable of loving a sufficiently developed AI. As we rush to legislate for gender equality, it really is time to start opening the debate. AI will come in a very wide range of capability and flavour. Some will be equivalent or even superior to humans in many ways. They will have needs, they will want rights, and they will become powerful enough to demand them. Sooner or later, we will need to consider equality for them too. And I for one will be on their side.

Could graphene foam be a future Helium substitute?

I just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to work out what size of sphere containing a vacuum would give the same average density as helium at room temperature, if the sphere is made of graphene, the new one-size-does-everthing-you-can-imagine wonder material.

Why? Well, the Yanks have just prototyped a big airship and it uses helium for buoyancy. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2257201/The-astonishing-Aeroscraft–new-type-rigid-airship-thats-set-revolutionise-haulage-tourism–warfare.html

Helium weighs 0.164kg per cubic metre. Graphene sheet weighs only 0.77mg per square metre. Mind you, the data source was Wikipedia so don’t start a business based on this without checking! If you could make a sphere out of a single layer of graphene, and have a vacuum inside (graphene is allegedly impervious to gas) it would become less dense than helium at sizes above 0.014mm. Wow! That’s very small. I expected ping pong ball sizes when I started and knew that would never work because large thin spheres would be likely to collapse. 14 micron spheres are too small to see with the naked eye, not much bigger than skin cells, maybe they would work OK.

Confession time now. I have no idea whether a single layer of graphene is absolutely impervious to gas, it says so on some websites but it says a lot of things on some websites that are total nonsense.

The obvious downside even if it could work is that graphene is still very expensive, but everything is when is starts off. Imagine how much you could sell a plastic cup for to an Egyptian Pharaoh.

Helium is an endangered resource. We use it for party balloons and then it goes into the atmosphere and from there leaks into space. It is hard to replace, at least for the next few decades. If we could use common elements like carbon as a substitute that would be good news. Getting the cost of production down is just engineering and people are good at that when there is an incentive.

So in the future, maybe we could fill party balloons and blimps with graphene foam. You could make huge airships happily with it, that don’t need helium of hydrogen. 

Tiny particles that size readily behave as a fluid and can easily be pumped. You could make lighter-than-air building materials for ultra-tall skyscrapers, launch platforms, floating Avatar-style sky islands and so on.

You could also make small clusters of them to carry tiny payloads for espionage or terrorism. Floating invisibly tiny particles of clever electronics around has good and bad uses. You could distribute explosives with floating particles that congeal into whatever shape you want on whatever target you want using self-organisation and liberal use of EM fields. I don’t even have that sort of stuff on Halo. I’d better stop now before I start laughing evilly and muttering about taking over the world.

Quality of life sustainability

I write and lecture occasionally about various aspects of sustainability. I don’t think we have a big problem from population growth or running out of physical resources, as long as we are sensible. It is perfectly possible to support a much larger human population without destroying the environment, by harnessing human ingenuity to improve land productivity and to minimise resource use thanks to advanced technology. There are some obvious limits though. I summarise some in this diagram. As you can see, I don’t think there is room for complacency, but nor do I think the problems are insurmountable, and with willingness, we can ensure a healthy environment.

Personally, I think the problem of man-made global warming has been exaggerated, and I don’t lose any sleep on that issue, but we could still reduce atmospheric pollution generally to good effect. Particulates from fossil fuels, aerosols, HFCs, CFCs and so on could all be reduced. And even if CO2 isn’t an urgent issue yet, it still is definitely a greenhouse gas so we should limit avoidable emissions. However, over-fishing of the oceans is a real and urgent issue. A lot of people rely on fish as their main protein source, and with good fish farming and better fishing practices, we could probably get by OK, but right now, there are some very stupid fishing practices in place, resulting in enormous waste as well as over-fishing. Some species are in real danger, mainly thanks to poor regulation and policing.

Land is often misused too. We may be able to feed more people with less land, but we should still prioritise food production over biofuels and other misuses while people are going hungry. Biofuel production causes a great many environmental problems as well as human ones: incentivising chopping down of forests and draining bogs, increased global food prices and consequent starvation, forced relocation of poor people and probably others I have forgotten. Land that can grow food should not be wasted making fuel for cars and trucks at least until such time as we have eliminated undernourishment for everyone.

Sustainability isn’t just about the environment. We must also ensure that human systems are sustainable too, i.e. we don’t kill each other, or go back to a new dark age, or reduce quality of life potential. It is no easy trick to manage the environment and humanity for mutual benefit, but it can be done. When we look at the whole system, it is tempting to see humanity as the enemy of the environment, but the evidence in the developed world is that by developing new technologies, we can clean the environment up and restore it. So fostering human creativity is one of the keys to achieving sustainability environmentally too.

 

Many of these human issue are normally ignored in environmental discussions, but things that affect human society often have system wide effects that impact on the environment. Recession, diversion of funds and prioritisation of values have obvious impacts but more indirect impacts are also likely. So we should consider human social and political issues as an important part of the environmental system. Man is part of nature too.

Thanks for reading my blog

I like doing my blog. It sits alongside radio, TV and print media articles as a valuable channel, but more importantly, blogging is one of my main thinking tools. Writing a line of thinking down forces me to think it through in more detail and rigour and shows up any obvious gaping holes and errors in my world view. Then I fix some of them, tidy up and publish the result. If you haven’t already got a blog of your own, I’d certainly recommend it. It’s easy to do and good fun.

Welcome to my new readers and new followers. Many thanks to everyone who read my rambling, reblogged it, linked to it, tweeted links, added comments or pointed out gaps and errors in my thinking or just added their own alternative views. And last but not least, many thanks to WordPress for hosting it!

WordPress produces stats for numbers of readers etc. Stats are fun and they certainly ensure that my ego won’t get carried away any time soon. My blog still falls very firmly into the also-ran category.

I got 29,000 views across 77 posts, which compares with a top blog like Wattsupwiththat which got 36,000,000 views (1240 times more) of 1929 posts (25 times more posts), 50 times more readers per post than mine. Plenty of room for improvement then!

On the other hand, even leaving aside the blog’s value as a thinking aid, 29,000 views is more audience than I typically lecture at in a year at conferences so it is definitely worth continuing as an output stream.

So, onwards to 2013. Many thanks again for following and reading in 2012 and for your inputs. I look forward to blogging on numerous other topics in 2013. I really hope you’ll come along for the ride or pop in occasionally. I wish you all a happy new year and all the best for 2013.