Reverse engineering the brain is a very slow way to make a smart computer

The race is on to build conscious and smart computers and brain replicas. This article explains some of Markam’s approach. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/neurologist-markam-human-brain/all/

It is a nice project, and its aims are to make a working replica of the brain by reverse engineering it. That would work eventually, but it is slow and expensive and it is debatable how valuable it is as a goal.

Imagine if you want to make an aeroplane from scratch.  You could study birds and make extremely detailed reverse engineered mathematical models of the structures of individual feathers, and try to model all the stresses and airflows as the wing beats. Eventually you could make a good model of a wing, and by also looking at the electrics, feedbacks, nerves and muscles, you could eventually make some sort of control system that would essentially replicate a bird wing. Then you could scale it all up, look for other materials, experiment a bit and eventually you might make a big bird replica. Alternatively, you could look briefly at a bird and note the basic aerodynamics of a wing, note the use of lightweight and strong materials, then let it go. You don’t need any more from nature than that. The rest can be done by looking at ways of propelling the surface to create sufficient airflow and lift using the aerofoil, and ways to achieve the strength needed. The bird provides some basic insight, but it simply isn’t necessary to copy all a bird’s proprietary technology to fly.

Back to Markam. If the real goal is to reverse engineer the actual human brain and make a detailed replica or model of it, then fair enough. I wish him and his team, and their distributed helpers and affiliates every success with that. If the project goes well, and we can find insights to help with the hundreds of brain disorders and improve medicine, great. A few billion euros will have been well spent, especially given the waste of more billions of euros elsewhere on futile and counter-productive projects. Lots of people criticise his goal, and some of their arguments are nonsensical. It is a good project and for what it’s worth, I support it.

My only real objection is that a simulation of the brain will not think well and at best will be an extremely inefficient thinking machine. So if a goal is to achieve thought or intelligence, the project as described is barking up the wrong tree. If that isn’t a goal, so what? It still has the other uses.

A simulation can do many things. It can be used to follow through the consequences of an input if the system is sufficiently well modelled. A sufficiently detailed and accurate brain simulation could predict the impacts of a drug or behaviours resulting from certain mental processes. It could follow through the impacts and chain of events resulting from an electrical impulse  this finding out what the eventual result of that will be. It can therefore very inefficiently predict the result of thinking, but by using extremely high speed computation, it could in principle work out the end result of some thoughts. But it needs enormous detail and algorithmic precision to do that. I doubt it is achievable simply because of the volume of calculation needed.  Thinking properly requires consciousness and therefore emulation. A conscious circuit has to be built, not just modelled.

Consciousness is not the same as thinking. A simulation of the brain would not be conscious, even if it can work out the result of thoughts. It is the difference between printed music and played music. One is data, one is an experience. A simulation of all the processes going on inside a head will not generate any consciousness, only data. It could think, but not feel or experience.

Having made that important distinction, I still think that Markam’s approach will prove useful. It will generate many useful insights into the workings of the brain, and many of the processes nature uses to solve certain engineering problems. These insights and techniques can be used as input into other projects. Biomimetics is already proven as a useful tool in solving big problems. Looking at how the brain works will give us hints how to make a truly conscious, properly thinking machine. But just as with birds and airbuses, we can take ideas and inspiration from nature and then do it far better. No bird can carry the weight or fly as high or as fast as an aeroplane. No proper plane uses feathers or flaps its wings.

I wrote recently about how to make a conscious computer:

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/how-to-make-a-conscious-computer/ and http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/how-smart-could-an-ai-become/

I still think that approach will work well, and it could be a decade faster than going Markam’s route. All the core technology needed to start making a conscious computer already exists today. With funding and some smart minds to set the process in motion, it could be done in a couple of years. The potential conscious and ultra-smart computer, properly harnessed, could do its research far faster than any human on Markam’s team. It could easily beat them to the goal of a replica brain. The converse is not true, Markam’s current approach would yield a conscious computer very slowly.

So while I fully applaud the effort and endorse the goals, changing the approach now could give far more bang for the buck, far faster.

The future of music creation

When I was a student, I saw people around me that could play musical instruments and since I couldn’t, I felt a bit inadequate, so I went out and bought a £13 guitar and taught myself to play. Later, I bought a keyboard and learned to play that too. I’ve never been much good at either, and can’t read music, but  if I know a tune, I can usually play it by ear and sometimes I compose, though I never record any of my compositions. Music is highly rewarding, whether listening or creating. I play well enough for my enjoyment and there are plenty of others who can play far better to entertain audiences.

Like almost everyone, most of the music I listen to is created by others and today, you can access music by a wide range of means. It does seem to me though that the music industry is stuck in the 20th century. Even concerts seem primitive compared to what is possible. So have streaming and download services. For some reason, new technology seems mostly to have escaped its attention, apart from a few geeks. There are a few innovative musicians and bands out there but they represent a tiny fraction of the music industry. Mainstream music is decades out of date.

Starting with the instruments themselves, even electronic instruments produce sound that appears to come from a single location. An electronic violin or guitar is just an electronic version of a violin or guitar, the sound all appears to come from a single point all the way through. It doesn’t  throw sound all over the place or use a wide range of dynamic effects to embrace the audience in surround sound effects. Why not? Why can’t a musician or a technician make the music meander around the listener, creating additional emotional content by getting up close, whispering right into an ear, like a violinist picking out an individual woman in a bar and serenading her? High quality surround sound systems have been in home cinemas for yonks. They are certainly easy to arrange in a high budget concert. Audio shouldn’t stop with stereo. It is surprising just how little use current music makes of existing surround sound capability. It is as if they think everyone only ever listens on headphones.

Of course, there is no rule that electronic instruments have to be just electronic derivatives of traditional ones, and to be fair, many sounds and effects on keyboards and electric guitars do go a lot further than just emulating traditional variants. But there still seems to be very little innovation in new kinds of instrument to explore dynamic audio effects, especially any that make full use of the space around the musician and audience. With the gesture recognition already available even on an Xbox or PS3, surely we should have a much more imaginative range of potential instruments, where you can make precise gestures, wave or throw your arms, squeeze your hands, make an emotional facial expression or delicately pinch, bend or slide fingers to create effects. Even multi-touch on phones or pads should have made a far bigger impact by now.

(As an aside, ever since I was a child, I have thought that there must be a visual equivalent to music. I don’t know what it is, and probably never will, but surely, there must be visual patterns or effects that can generate an equivalent emotional response to music. I feel sure that one day someone will discover how to generate them and the field will develop.)

The human body is a good instrument itself. Most people can sing to a point or at least hum or whistle a tune even if they can’t play an instrument. A musical instrument is really just an unnecessary interface between your brain, which knows what sound you want to make, and an audio production mechanism. Up until the late 20th century, the instrument made the sound, today, outside of a live concert at least,  it is very usually a computer with a digital to analog converter and a speaker attached. Links between computers and people are far better now though, so we can bypass the hard-to-learn instrument bit. With thought recognition, nerve monitoring, humming, whistling, gesture and expression recognition and so on, there is a very rich output from the body that can potentially be used far more intuitively and directly to generate the sound. You shouldn’t have to learn how to play an instrument in the 21st century. The sound creation process should interface almost directly to your brain as intuitively as your body does. If you can hum it, you can play it. Or should be able to, if the industry was keeping up.

Going a bit further, most of us have some idea what sort of music or effect we want to create, but don’t know quite enough about music to have the experience or skill to know quite what. A skilled composer may be able to write something down right away to achieve a musical effect that the rest of us would struggle to imagine. So, add some AI. Most music is based on fairly straightforward mathematical principles, even symphonies are mostly combinations of effects and sequences that fit well within AI-friendly guidelines. We use calculators to do calculations, so use AI to help compose music. Any of us should be able to compose great music with tools we should be able to build now. It shouldn’t be the future, it should be the present.

Let’s look at music distribution. When we buy a music track or stream it, why do we still only get the audio? Why isn’t the music video included by default? Sure, you can watch on YouTube but then you generally get low quality audio and video. Why isn’t purchased music delivered at the highest quality with full HD 3D video included, or videos if the band has made a few, with all the latest ones included as they emerge? If a video is available for music video channels, it surely should be available to those who have bought the music. That it isn’t reflects the contempt that the music industry generally shows to its customers. It treats us as a bunch of thieves who must only ever be given the least possible access for the greatest possible outlay, to make up for all the times we must of course be stealing off them. That attitude has to change if the industry is to achieve its potential. 

Augmented reality is emerging now. It already offers some potential to add overlays at concerts but in a few years, when video visors are commonplace, we should expect to see band members playing up in the air, flying around the audience, virtual band members, cartoon and fantasy creations all over the place doping all sorts of things, visual special effects overlaying the sound effects. Concerts will be a spectacular opportunity to blend the best of visual, audio, dance, storytelling, games and musical arts together. Concerts could be much more exciting, if they use the technology potential. Will they? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Much of this could be done already, but only a little is.

Now lets consider the emotional connection between a musician and the listener. We are all very aware of the intense (though unilateral) relationship teens can often build with their pop idols. They may follow them on Twitter and other social nets as well as listening to their music and buying their posters. Augmented reality will let them go much further still. They could have their idol with them pretty much all the time, virtually present in their field of view, maybe even walking hand in hand, maybe even kissing them. The potential spectrum extends from distant listening to intimate cuddles. Bearing in mind especially the ages of many fans, how far should we allow this to go and how could it be policed?

Clothing adds potential to the emotional content during listening too. Headphones are fine for the information part of audio, but the lack of stomach-throbbing sound limits the depth of the experience. Music is more than information. Some music is only half there if it isn’t at the right volume. I know from personal experience that not everyone seems to understand this, but turning the volume down (or indeed up) sometimes destroys the emotional content. Sometimes you have to feel the music, sometimes let it fully conquer your senses. Already, people are experimenting with clothes that can house electronics, some that flash on and off in synch with the music, and some that will be able to contract and expand their fibres under electronic control. You will be able to buy clothes that give you the same vibration you would otherwise get from the sub-woofer or the rock concert.

Further down the line, we will be able to connect IT directly into the nervous system. Active skin is not far away. Inducing voltages and current in nerves via tiny implants or onplants on patches of skin will allow computers to generate sensations directly.

This augmented reality and a link to the nervous system gives another whole dimension to telepresence. Band members at a concert will be able to play right in front of audience members, shake them, cuddle them. The emotional connection could be a lot better.

Picking up electrical clues from the skin allows automated music selection according to the wearers emotional state. Even properties like skin conductivity can give clues about emotional state. Depending on your stress level for example, music could be played that soothes you, or if you feel calm, maybe more stimulating tracks could be played. Playlists would thus adapt to how you feel.

Finally, music is a social thing too. It brings people together in shared experiences. This is especially true for the musicians, but audience members often feel some shared experience too. Atmosphere. Social networking already sees some people sharing what music they are listening too (I don’t want to share my tastes but I recognise that some people do, and that’s fine). Where shared musical taste is important to a social group, it could be enhanced by providing tools to enable shared composition. AI can already write music in particular styles – you can feed Mozart of Beethoven into some music generators and they will produce music that sounds like it had been composed by that person, they can compose that as fast as it comes out of the speakers. It could take style preferences from a small group of people and produce music that fits across those styles. The result is a sort of tribal music, representative of the tribe that generated it. In this way, music could become even more of a social tool in the future than it already is.

3D printable guns are here to stay, but we need to ban magnets from flights too.

It’s interesting watching new technologies emerge. Someone has a bright idea, it gets hyped a bit, then someone counter-hypes a nightmare scenario and everyone panics. Then experts queue up to say why it can’t be done, then someone does it, then more panic, then knee-jerk legislation, then eventually the technology becomes part of everyday life.

I was once dismissed by our best radio experts when I suggested making cellphone masts like the ones you see on every high building today. I recall being taught that you couldn’t possibly ever get more than 19.2kbits/s down a phone line. I got heavily marked down in an appraisal for my obvious stupidity suggesting that mobile phones could include video cameras. I am well used to being told something is impossible, but if I can see how to make it work, I don’t care, I believe it anyway. My personal mantra is ‘just occasionally, everyone else IS wrong’. I am an engineer. Some engineers might not know how to do something, but others sometimes can.

When the printable gun was suggested (not by me this time!) I accepted it as an inevitable part of the future immediately. I then listened as experts argued that it could never survive the forces. But guess what? A gun doesn’t have to survive. It just needs to work once, then you use a fresh one. The first prototypes only worked for a few bullets before breaking. The Liberator was made to work just once. Missiles are like that. They fire once, only once. So you bring a few to the battle.

The recently uploaded blueprint for the Liberator printable gun has been taken offline after 100,000 copies were downloaded, so it will be about as hard to find as embarrassing pictures of any celebrity. There will be innovations, refinements, improvements, then we will see them in use by hobbyists and criminals alike.

But there are loads of ways to skin a cat, allegedly. A gun’s job is to quickly accelerate a small mass up to a high speed in a short distance. Using explosives in a bullet held in a printable lump of plastic clearly does the job on a one-shot basis, but you still need a bullet and they don’t sell them in Tesco’s. So why do it that way?

A Gauss Rifle is a science toy that can fire a ball-bearing across your living room. You can make one in 5 minutes using nothing more than sticky tape, a ruler and some neodymium magnets. Here’s a nice example of the toy version using simple steel balls:

http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/gauss.html

The concept is very well known, though a bit harder to Google now because so many computer games have used the same name for imaginary weapons. In an easily adapted version, where the steel balls are replaced by neodymium magnets held in place in alternately attracting and repelling polarities, when the first magnet is released, it is pulled by strong magnetic force to the second one, hitting it quite fast, and conveying all that energy to the next stage magnet, which is then pushed away from the one repelling it towards the one attracting it, so accumulating lots of energy. The energy accumulates over several stages, optimally harnessing the full repulsive and attractive forces available from the strong magnets. Too many stages result in the magnets shattering, but with care, four stages with simple steel balls can be used reasonably safely as a toy.

Some sites explain that if you position the magnets accurately with the poles oriented right, you can get it to make a small hole in a wall. I imagine you could design and print a gauss rifle jig with very high precision, far better than you could do with tape and your fingers, that would hold the magnets in the right locations and polarity orientations.  Then just put your magnets in and it is ready. Neodymium magnets are easily available in various sizes at low cost and the energy of the final ball is several times as high as the first one. With the larger magnets, the magnetic forces are extremely high so the energy accumulated would also be high. A sharp plastic dart housing the last ball would make quite a dangerous device. A Gauss rifle might lack the force of a conventional gun, but it could still be quite powerful. If I was in charge of airport security, I’d already be banning magnets from flights.

I really don’t see how you could stop someone making this sort of thing, or plastic crossbows or fancy plastic jigs with stored energy in springs that can be primed in an aircraft toilet that fire things in imaginative ways. There are zillions of ways to accelerate something, some of which can be done in cascades that only generate tolerable forces at any particular point so could easily work with printable materials. The current focus on firearms misses the point. You don’t have to transfer all the energy to a projectile in one short high pressure burst, you can accumulate it in stages. Focusing security controls on explosives-based systems will leave us vulnerable.

3D printable weapons are here to stay, but for criminals and terrorists, bullets with explosives in might soon be obsolete.

Killing machines

There is rising concern about machines such as drones and battlefield robots that could soon be given the decision on whether to kill someone. Since I wrote this and first posted it a couple of weeks ago, the UN has put out their thoughts as the DM writes today:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2318713/U-N-report-warns-killer-robots-power-destroy-human-life.html 

At the moment, drones and robots are essentially just remote controlled devices and a human makes the important decisions. In the sense that a human uses them to dispense death from a distance, they aren’t all that different from a spear or a rifle apart from scale of destruction and the distance from which death can be dealt. Without consciousness, a missile is no different from a spear or bullet, nor is a remote controlled machine that it is launched from. It is the act of hitting the fire button that is most significant, but proximity is important too. If an operator is thousands of miles away and isn’t physically threatened, or perhaps has never even met people from the target population, other ethical issues start emerging. But those are ethical issues for the people, not the machine.

Adding artificial intelligence to let a machine to decide whether a human is to be killed or not isn’t difficult per se. If you don’t care about killing innocent people, it is pretty easy. It is only made difficult because civilised countries value human lives, and because they distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Personally, I don’t fully understand the distinction between combatants and soldiers. In wars, often combatants have no real choice but to fight or are conscripted, and they are usually told what to do, often by civilian politicians hiding in far away bunkers, with strong penalties for disobeying. If a country goes to war, on the basis of a democratic mandate, then surely everyone in the electorate is guilty, even pacifists, who accept the benefits of living in the host country but would prefer to avoid the costs. Children are the only innocents.

In my analysis, soldiers in a democratic country are public sector employees like any other, just doing a job on behalf of the electorate. But that depends to some degree on them keeping their personal integrity and human judgement. The many military who take pride in following orders could be thought of as being dehumanised and reduced to killing machines. Many would actually be proud to be thought of as killing machines. A soldier like that, who merely follow orders, deliberately abdicates human responsibility. Having access to the capability for good judgement, but refusing to use it, they reduce themselves to a lower moral level than a drone. At least a drone doesn’t know what it is doing.

On the other hand, disobeying a direct order may save soothe issues of conscience but invoke huge personal costs, anything from shaming and peer disapproval to execution. Balancing that is a personal matter, but it is the act of balancing it that is important, not necessarily the outcome. Giving some thought to the matter and wrestling at least a bit with conscience before doing it makes all the difference. That is something a drone can’t yet do.

So even at the start, the difference between a drone and at least some soldiers is not always as big as we might want it to be, for other soldiers it is huge. A killing machine is competing against a grey scale of judgement and morality, not a black and white equation. In those circumstances, in a military that highly values following orders, human judgement is already no longer an essential requirement at the front line. In that case, the leaders might set the drones into combat with a defined objective, the human decision already taken by them, the local judgement of who or what to kill assigned to adaptive AI, algorithms and sensor readings. For a military such as that, drones are no different to soldiers who do what they’re told.

However, if the distinction between combatant and civilian is required, then someone has to decide the relative value of different classes of lives. Then they either have to teach it to the machines so they can make the decision locally, or the costs of potential collateral damage from just killing anyone can be put into the equations at head office. Or thirdly, and most likely in practice, a compromise can be found where some judgement is made in advance and some locally. Finally, it is even possible for killing machines to make decisions on some easier cases and refer difficult ones to remote operators.

We live in an electronic age, with face recognition, friend or foe electronic ID, web searches, social networks, location and diaries, mobile phone signals and lots of other clues that might give some knowledge of a target and potential casualties. How important is it to kill or protect this particular individual or group, or take that particular objective? How many innocent lives are acceptable cost, and from which groups – how many babies, kids, adults, old people? Should physical attractiveness or the victim’s professions be considered? What about race or religion, or nationality, or sexuality, or anything else that could possibly be found out about the target before killing them? How much should people’s personal value be considered, or should everyone be treated equal at point of potential death? These are tough questions, but the means of getting hold of the date are improving fast and we will be forced to answer them. By the time truly intelligent drones will be capable of making human-like decisions, they may well know who they are killing.

In some ways this far future with a smart or even conscious drone or robot making informed decisions before killing people isn’t as scary as the time between now and then. Terminator and Robocop may be nightmare scenarios, but at least in those there is clarity of which one is the enemy. Machines don’t yet have anywhere near that capability. However, if an objective is considered valuable, military leaders could already set a machine to kill people even when there is little certainty about the role or identity of the victims. They may put in some algorithms and crude AI to improve performance or reduce errors, but the algorithmic uncertainty and callous uncaring dispatch of potentially innocent people is very worrying.

Increasing desperation could be expected to lower barriers to use. So could a lower regard for the value of human life, and often in tribal conflicts people don’t consider the lives of the opposition to have a very high value. This is especially true in terrorism, where the objective is often to kill innocent people. It might not matter that the drone doesn’t know who it is killing, as long as it might be killing the right target as part of the mix. I think it is reasonable to expect a lot of battlefield use and certainly terrorist use of semi-smart robots and drones that kill relatively indiscriminatingly. Even when truly smart machines arrive, they might be set to malicious goals.

Then there is the possibility of rogue drones and robots. The Terminator/Robocop scenario. If machines are allowed to make their own decisions and then to kill, can we be certain that the safeguards are in place that they can always be safely deactivated? Could they be hacked? Hijacked? Sabotaged by having their fail-safes and shut-offs deactivated? Have their ‘minds’ corrupted? As an engineer, I’d say these are realistic concerns.

All in all, it is a good thing that concern is rising and we are seeing more debate. It is late, but not too late, to make good progress to limit and control the future damage killing machines might do. Not just directly in loss of innocent life, but to our fundamental humanity as armies get increasingly used to delegating responsibility to machines to deal with a remote dehumanised threat. Drones and robots are not the end of warfare technology, there are far scarier things coming later. It is time to get a grip before it is too late.

When people fought with sticks and stones, at least they were personally involved. We must never allow personal involvement to disappear from the act of killing someone.

Isn’t graphene fun?

I’ve just been checking up on progress on supercapacitors to see if they are up to the job of replacing car batteries yet. It looks like they will be soon. Supercapacitors have lower energy density than lithium batteries, but can be charged extremely quickly.

My favoured technique is to build mats into the road surface every 50 metres (i.e. same as streetlights), and to charge the supercapacitor bank using induction as the car passes over them. That means that even a small energy capacity would be adequate. It wouldn’t have to power the car for 100 miles or more like a battery, but only for the first and last few kilometres of a journey where there are no mats. Otherwise, range wouldn’t be limited as it would charge all the time on the trip.

However, a few minutes ago I had another little spark of enlightenment. Why not also use the pads for propulsion too, using a linear induction motor?  (I like those)

If the pad gives an impulse to the car as well as a capacitor recharge, then the capacitor won’t need to be as big. And if the impulse is gentle enough, passengers won’t feel a jolt every time they drive over one.

Another little insight, hardly worthy of the name, is that with trains of self driving pods, the pods could be so close together on most journeys that they effectively have a continuous circuit from one end of the train to the other. That means that public transport pods that are only used locally and on certain routes might be able to get by with tiny capacitor banks.

Culture tax and sustainable capitalism

I have written several times now about changing capitalism and democracy to make them suited to the 21st century. Regardless of party politics, most people want a future where nobody is too poor to live a dignified and comfortable life. To ensuring that that is possible, we need to tweak a few things.

I suggested a long time ago that there could be a basic income for all, without any means testing on it, so that everyone has an income at a level they can live on. No means testing means little admin. Then wages go on top, so that everyone is encouraged to work, and then all income from all sources is totalled and taxed appropriately. It is a nice idea. I wasn’t the first to recommend it and many others are saying much the same. The idea is old, but the figures are rarely discussed. It is harder than it sounds and being a nice idea doesn’t ensure  economic feasibility.

The difference between figures between parties would be relatively minor so let’s ignore party politics. In today’s money, it would be great if everyone could have, say, £30k a year as a state benefit, then earn whatever they can on top. 30k doesn’t make you rich, but you can live OK on it so nobody would be poor in any proper sense of the word. With everyone economically provided for and able to lead comfortable and dignified lives, it would be a utopia compared to today. Sadly, it doesn’t add up yet. 65,000,000 x 30,000 = 1,950Bn . The UK economy isn’t that big. The state only gets to control part of GDP and out of that reduced budget it also has its other costs of providing health, education, defence etc, so the amount that could be dished out to everyone on this basis is therefore a lot smaller than 30k. Even if the state takes 75% of GDP and spends most of it on the base allowance, 10k per person would be pushing it. So a family could afford a modest lifestyle, but single people would really struggle. Some people would need additional help, and that reduces the pool left to pay the basic allowance still further. Also, if the state takes 75% of GDP, only 25% is left for everything else, so salaries would be flat, reducing the incentive to work, while investment and entrepreneurial activity are starved of both resources and incentive.

Simple maths thus forces us to make compromises. Sharing resources reduces costs considerably. In a first revision, families might be given less for kids than for the adults, but what about groups of young adults sharing a big house? They may be adults but they also benefit from the same economy of shared resources. So maybe there should be a household limit, or a bedroom tax, or forms and means testing, and it mustn’t incentivise people living separately or house supply suffers. Anyway, it is already getting complicated and our original nice idea is in the bin. That’s why it is such a mess at the moment. There just isn’t enough money to make everyone comfortable without doing lots of allowances and testing and admin. We all want utopia, but we can’t afford it. Even the modest 30k-per-person utopia costs at least 3 times more than we can afford.

However, if we can get back to an average 2.5% growth per year in real terms, and surely we can, it would only take 45 years to get there. That isn’t such a long time. We have hope that if we can get some better government than we have had of late, and are prepared to live with a little economic tweaking, we could achieve good quality of life for all in the second half of the century.

So I really like the idea of a simple welfare system, providing a generous base level allowance to everyone, topped up by rewards of effort, but we will have to wait before we can afford to put that base level at anything like comfortable standards.

Meanwhile, we need to tweak some other things to have any chance of getting there. I’ve commented often that pure capitalism would eventually lead to a machine-based economy, with the machine owners having more and more of the cash, and everyone else getting poorer, so the system will fail. Communism fails too.

On the other hand, capitalism works fine when rewards are shared more equally, it fails when wealth concentration is too high or when incentive is too low. Preserving the incentive to work and create is a mainly matter of setting tax levels well. Making sure that wealth doesn’t get concentrated too much needs a new kind of tax.

The solution I suggest is a culture tax. Culture in the widest meaning.

When someone creates and builds a company, they don’t do so from a state of nothing. They currently take for granted all the accumulated knowledge and culture, trained workforce, access to infrastructure, machines, governance, administrative systems, markets, distribution systems and so on. They add just another tiny brick to what is already a huge and highly elaborate structure. They may invest heavily in their time and money but actually when  considered overall as part of the system their company inhabits, they only pay for a fraction of the things their company will use.

That accumulated knowledge, culture and infrastructure belongs to everyone, not just those who choose to use it. Businesses might consider that this is what they pay taxes for already, but that isn’t explicit in the current system.

The big businesses that are currently avoiding paying UK taxes by paying overseas companies for intellectual property rights could be seen as trailblazing this approach. If they can understand and even justify the idea of paying another part of their company for IP or a franchise, why not pay the host country for IP for access to their entire culture?

This kind of tax would provide the means needed to avoid too much concentration of wealth. A future  businessman might choose to use only software and machines instead of a human workforce to save costs, but levying taxes on use of  the cultural base that makes that possible allows a direct link between use of advanced technology and taxation. Sure, he might add a little extra insight or new knowledge, but would still have to pay the rest of society for access to its share of the cultural base, inherited from the previous generations, on which his company is based. The more he automates, the more sophisticated his use of the system, the more he cuts a human workforce out of his empire, the higher his taxation.

Linking to technology use makes sense. Future AI and robots could do a lot of work currently done by humans. A very small number of people could own almost all of the productive economy. But they would be getting far more than their share of the cultural base, which must belong equally to everyone. In a village where one farmer owns all the sheep, other villagers would be right to ask for rent for their share of the commons if he wants to graze them there.

I feel confident that this extra tax would solve many of the problems associated with automation. We all equally own the country, its culture, laws, language, human knowledge (apart from current patents, trademarks etc. of course), its public infrastructure, not just businessmen. Everyone surely should have the right to be paid if someone else uses part of their share.

The extra culture tax would not magically make the economy bigger. It would just ensure that it is more equally shared out. It is a useful tool to be used by future governments to make it possible to keep capitalism sustainable, preventing its collapse, preserving incentive while fairly distributing reward. Without such a tax, capitalism simply may not survive.

Water companies to deliver Gbit broadband over wet string

Warning: to avoid wasting your time, and since it is no longer April 1st, be aware that this was published as an April Fool joke. Please enjoy it but don’t take it seriously:

Optical fibre is sometimes laid in conventional cable form just like copper wires, but because the actual fibres are so light, they can be coated with a rough surfacing that lets them be blown through plastic ducts using compressed air (the plastic ducts are under 1cm diameter). The fibre wiggles its way to the far end, carried by the air flow. It is simply called ‘blown fibre’ and is used extensively where ducts can easily be laid.

The water industry obviously has huge experience in making smooth channels for water to flow through to every building in the land. Blown fibre technology can adapt to this. Several years ago, advised by future technology consultants Futurizon, research produced a soft furry coating that makes it easy to flush coated fibres down water pipes. The coating is based on sugar and has the consistency of candyfloss. The clever breakthrough was making it so that it lasts until installation is complete and then dissolves harmlessly away in less than an hour.  It is of course safe to drink the tap water even soon after installation.  The remaining problem was how to route the fibres when they come to a junction. The inspiration came from optically guided missiles, which have steerable nose cones, that allow the missile to be routed in the required direction just by rotating the cone. Adding a tiny reusable nose cone capsule to the head to the fibre, and knowing the architecture of the pipework, the fibre can be routed correctly at each junction.

A global consortium of water companies now plans to install nationwide fibre networks via the water supply via a company called Fallopior. The main offices and roll-outs will be in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and the USA, all of which face issues of getting access to ultrafast broadband for rural areas and all of which have the carbon subsidy economics to make it work. The name of Fallopior presumably emerged because the system uses tubes for delivery and perhaps to try to tap into the female broadband market. At the home, a broadband ‘tap’ is installed that allows the fibre to emerge. Once the fibre is delivered and connected, it is pushed through a silicone plug that is pushed into the tap to completely seal it.

The fibre is routed all the way to the home by this means, and then the broadband tap is opened. A few litres of water later, and the fibre is delivered. It is far more environmentally friendly way of installing the fibre than digging up pavements and roads. The carbon savings and the selling of the associated credits are calculated to reduce the cost of installation to almost zero. This even works in remote areas since the carbon savings are of course far higher here too. The costs of the fibre are low enough to be absorbed into even a low rental agreement. Fallopior say that they can will offer 1Gb/s to any home even in the remotest parts of the country for as little as £5 per month, and this is easily enough to deliver all the high definition TV and internet a home.

Broadband providers have struggled with the economics of fibre to the home and many homes still have to suffer slow broadband, even though they pay far more than this, especially in the country. But all homes have a water supply, so this technology is perfectly adapted. Since the roll-out plans of the other UK providers are so sluggish, the water companies expect to seize massive market share almost overnight.

Some homes questioned about the potential service insisted they don’t want ultra-high speed broadband with the temptations it brings, and amazingly would prefer to have a slower service, even if it means they have to pay more to get less. Engineers have solved this one too. The coating allows very smooth thin nylon string to be coated temporarily and flushed down the pipes in the same way instead of fibre. Since the water keeps it lubricated, wear would be very low and it will only need replaced every 5 years. But that re-installation increases the cost to £7.50 per month.

Now to every nerd’s dream – just like two cans with string between them, this wet string will transmit high audio signals, 100KHz. With the phenomenal ability of today’s coding and compression schemes, this allows 3Mbit/s to be delivered, comparable with what many people receive today on their low speed broadband. Those questioned said they would be happier with this limit which lets them do basic internet access but not much else. It still competes extremely well on price with offerings from other providers so again Fallopior expect massive demand. In an emergency, when there is no electricity supply, a home-owner can still signal the emergency services by making a short series of tugs on the string. Simple Morse code SOS can easily be sent this way. 

A string plant in Cornwall has secretly been built in preparation and has stockpiled  over 100 million km of string. Others have been established on similar basis in the other consortium countries. As another carbon-subsidised activity, the UK site is attached to a 3MW wind turbine. This one looks a little unusual since the spinning motion of the blades is used directly via gears rather like a traditional windmill) to spin the string and power the machinery. String output therefore varies according to wind strength, hence the need to stockpile supplies. Nevertheless, the result is string that is entirely paid for via carbon subsidies. Location in remote Cornwall was chosen because of high winds and proximity to seaside resorts with easy access to local expertise from candyfloss experts. The late arrival of spring and hence the candyfloss market has meant that many were available and willing to assist on the project.

In spite of all the many benefits and promises of very low cost ultra-fast broadband, there is just one problem – as hinted by the unusual just-after-midnight timing of the press release by the Fallopior’s HQ in Auckland, New Zealand, and of course the company’s name.

Magic fingers and digital spells

There can’t be many readers who haven’t seen some film or TV programme or at least read a book where a witch or fairy points her finger and magic flows from her fingertip to execute her intent. Wizards can do it too, but they tend to use wands. Is it just that men like gadgets more and women are more in touch with their bodies? Maybe to a point, but that certainly isn’t universally true. Anyway, digital spells will be here soon.

Gesture recognition such as pointing at something has been around as a games interface since the Nintendo Wii, maybe before that. The Wii needed a cumbersome remote control, but with more recent machines, you can just use your fingers. That’s fine when you have the detector in front of you, and the computer only has to follow the direction of pointing and detect a key click or movement. But most of the time, you don’t. 

Some wristwatches have had digital compasses for decades, proving that they don’t need to be large. So do my iPhone and Nexus. But my iphone and Nexus are usually somewhere else, like my jacket pocket or briefcase, though I usually have a watch on when I am away from home. Some people seem glued to their mobiles, and they could also be used, but for those of us who aren’t, digital jewellery such as watches or signet rings offers a potential substitute to detect hand or finger gestures.

Knowing location and direction of pointing is fine if you can determine them cheaply and accurately in small devices, but adding a tiny and cheap camera to capture some visual context such as the shape of buildings nearby can help home in much on the target more accurately. Something like a signet ring, or indeed a watch, could easily house all that is needed. GPS positioning isn’t the only kid on the block. Wireless LANs, mobile phone networks and other gadgets you have in a pocket or bag will do just as well. I also think we will soon get urban positioning systems that give location to millimetre accuracy throughout urban areas.

Accelerometers can measure both the path and speed pattern of movements so fancy gestures could be used to determine the purpose of the point, i.e which digital spell to activate.

Also, your hand can make a lot of different shapes, and these can be determined by wearing a few rings and automatically monitoring their relative orientation. They don’t have to be bulky, even a very thin band could be enough.

So, pointing a finger and making a shape with the other fingers, or making some special hand movement before or during the gesture, you could make hundreds of spells. One to make a frog, another if you prefer mice. In augmented reality you’ll be able to do that. Your memory of which gesture links to which spell would run out long before the library of potential combinations would.

Digital spells could link into any electronic system or app as an intuitive interface. Paying for a drink, sending a message to an attractive stranger, passing a business card, authenticating identity to a bank machine, controlling a TV or a PC display to pretend it is touch sensitive. All of these could be easy. As augmented reality takes shape, your hands will become building tools.

Digital spells will make us feel more powerful too. Who wouldn’t get a thrill from making a gesture at an annoying person and turning them into something horrible?

And as Arthur C. Clarke used to say, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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.

Future reproduction for same-sex couples

Fertility is one of several equality battlegrounds. Same-sex couples don’t have equality when it comes to having babies. This time it isn’t just the law that needs changed but also biology before true equality can be claimed. Surprisingly perhaps, it is possible and almost certainly will happen. It will just take time.

In one scene in Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’,  one of the men demanded the right to have babies. Someone pointed out that he didn’t have a womb, so he accused them of oppression. He demanded the right to have babies, even if he couldn’t. Life imitates art. In real life, same-sex couples now are allowed to have babies; the debate has moved on to rights and the allocation of responsibility for paying for it if they want to do it via fertility treatment rather than adoption. But same-sex couples still can’t have babies where both partners each contribute half the genes.

Conventional fertility treatment using donor sperm already enables female couples to have kids. Men can make use of surrogate mothers. However, with conventional treatments, only one of the couple gets to be a genetic parent, a sperm or ovum donor being the other. There is far more to defining a person than their genes, but they do play an important role in determining our gender, nature and appearance. 

Technology will one day be able to let both partners in a same-sex couple contribute genes to their new baby. The general principle is easy enough to state. For women-only couples, use high-tech IVF to add the genes of one parent to an ovum from the other. For male only couples, just take the genes from each parent and put them in a donor egg that has had the genes removed from its nucleus.  

That still doesn’t quite deliver equality though. The female couples can’t make baby boys, because neither of them has a Y chromosome. The male couples can’t contribute the mitochondrial DNA or any of  the rest of an ovum, so some of the baby still isn’t theirs. So more progress is still needed. 

Reproductive equality will need the technology to take a cell from a man and make it into an ovum. There has already been some progress making eggs from stem cells in mice. e.g:

http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/05/hope-for-infertily-treatments-scientists-make-new-eggs-from-mouse-stem-cells/

so making them work properly and extending it to work in humans sounds feasible. Indeed, it sounds like the sort of thing we’d expect to hear about from stem cell research in the next decade.

Making Y chromosomes is harder. Some Y chromosome genes don’t exist in women, so Y chromosomes would have to come from donor men or else be assembled from scratch  We are very far from the level of genetic assembly needed to manufacture a human Y chromosome from scratch and even if we could, there still remains the decision over which genes to use. Picking from a library of Y chromosomes from male donors would be very much easier, and the rest of the chromosomes could come from the female couple.

So, men could get reproductive equality by using one of their own cells to make an ovum and adding their partner’s genes before implanting in a surrogate mother or artificial womb. Women can make baby girls but will have to compromise if they want a baby boy. They could self-source almost all the genes, but would have to import the Y chromosome. Not quite full equality, but close.

Eventually though, I think equality comes not by same-sex couples catching up with different-sex couples on old-fashioned biology, but by moving to synthetic biology. The far future of reproduction is that we will be able to design our offspring, look up which genes and other cellular components are needed, assemble the bits and incubate according to the required regime.

That won’t be easy, so it will be a long time off. You can’t directly calculate genotype from phenotype, but over time we can make databases of what leads to what. So it will realistically be several decades before we get there. Arguing over ethics and rights will probably take place in parallel so won’t necessarily slow development down much. So will development of artificial wombs.

The result is that any couple of any gender combination – and I’ve argued recently that we will get new genders in the future too – will be able to get their genes listed, combine them in any combination with those from their partners, friends, family and strangers and design any novel ones where nature doesn’t provide. Then they can simulate the potential combinations, tweak them to remove vulnerabilities or enhance qualities, eventually decide which ones they want to have as their kids, and essentially get them made to order. The gender of the parents shouldn’t make it any more or less difficult. Reproduction will then be a level playing field for same and different sex couples.