Tag: Transhumanism

Gene Therapy Cures Blindness in Monkeys

Wired Science and Singularity Hub both covered the recent publication in Nature of a study demonstrating curing color blindness in monkeys using gene therapy that allowed two squirrel monkeys to produce a protein that allowed them to see reds and greens.

Wired’s Brandon Keim wrote,

At first, the two monkeys behaved no differently than before. Though quick to earn a grape juice reward by picking out blue and yellow dots from a background of gray dots on a computer screen, they banged the screen randomly when presented with green or red dots.

But after five months, something clicked. The monkeys picked out red and green, again and again. At the biological level, Neitz can’t say precisely what happened — the monkeys, named Sam and Dalton, are alive and healthy, their brains unscanned and undissected — but their actions left no doubt.

[Jay] Neitz thinks the monkeys’ brains didn’t grow new neural circuits. “That’s the way we were thinking about neural plasticity before,” he said. Instead, their brains may have reconfigured themselves, “learning how to use the same old circuits in a new way when the information coming over the lines changed.”

And, of course, once you start talking about curing genetic defects, the possibility of creating genetic enhancements is ultimately on the table as well.

[David] Williams, however, was quicker to speculate. “Ultimately we might be able to do all kinds of interesting manipulations of the retina,” he said. “Not only might we be able to cure disease, but we might engineer eyes with remarkable capabilities. You can imagine conferring enhanced night vision in normal eyes, or engineering genes that make photopigments with spectral properties for whatever you want your eye to see.”

“This study makes that kind of science fiction future a distinct possibility, as opposed to a fantasy,” continued Williams.

No word on the possibility of x-ray or heat vision.

Augmented Reality Contact Lenses

Babak Parviz has written a fascinating overview of the challenges and promises of creating contact lenses with augmented reality features — think contact lenses driven by a portable device that effectively add a computer-generated overlay to the real world.

Parviz knows of what he speaks as the University of Washington professor and his students are already building one-off custom lenses that incorporate a single LED powered wirelessly by RF.

These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

Parviz also notes such contact lenses could be used to gather health and other information such as, for example, glucose levels for diabetics.

Parviz nicely lays out both the possibilities such a device would hold, but also the very real challenges in building one, especially since many of the substances that are routinely used in electronic devices are toxic, which starts to become a problem when you’re talking about putting them in nearly direct contact with the eye.

Personally, I’m hoping I live long enough to see something like this become common, though if texting and driving is a major problem, imagine what that will be when you can have YouTube streamed directly to the surface of your eye.

Solar Energy Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future highlights the simple observation behind the transhumanist vision,

Part of the rationale for being a “transhumanist”, or, more broadly, having grandiose dreams for humanity’s future, is the extremely simple and mundane observation that the available matter and free energy in our general vicinity is far larger than what we have utilized of it thus far. The incoming solar energy is about a million times greater than global energy consumption, and the available hydrothermal energy to be extracted from the energy gradient between the mantle and the upper crust is many times that. These energy sources far exceed that available from all fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium combined. In the long run (less than a century?), solar and hydrothermal will become our primary energy sources, simply because nothing else will be able to meet our exponentially growing demand.

Sometimes its difficult to imagine the sheer amount of energy in our small part of the universe, but this spiral energy scale diagram does a nice job of capturing it (note I did not fact-check the claims so you be the judge on the accuracy).  Note the two data points that address the point made by Anissimov:

All electricity since Tesla – approximately 10^21 joules

Daily receipt by Earth of total solar energy – approximately 10^22 joules

Anissimov — not surprisingly for a transhumanist — thinks we should be focused on finding ways of increasing the percentage of that energy and other abundant resources,

Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said “Enough”, enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, “we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential”. There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today’s world is “enough”, then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

Hell yeah.

The Vatican’s ‘Dignitas Personae’

The Center for Inquiry issued a press release in mid-December attacking the Catholic Church’s Dignitas Personae, largely on abortion-related grounds (the Catholic Church, not surprisingly, is still against it). According to CFI,

The Center for Inquiry, a think tank headquartered in Amherst, New York that supports research on bioethical questions, deplores the Vatican’s pronouncement. The Vatican’s position has no justification other than religious doctrine, according to the Center for Inquiry, and may have a serious adverse effect on scientific research and the development of medical therapies.

“I regret the renewed effort by the Vatican to censor—indeed prohibit—research in reproductive science,” said Paul Kurtz, chairman and founder of the Center for Inquiry. “Do we have to wage the Galileo battle again? The Vatican claims that their objections are “moral,” but they are based on a theological doctrine that a formless fertilized egg is a full human being, a position which most scientists reject.” Kurtz says there is a need to defend freedom of scientific research and the positive good that can ensue for countless numbers of infertile couples. “The effort to curtail stem cell research is especially disturbing in the view of the possible beneficent results for improving human health,” he said.

The Vatican has focused on commonplace scientific technologies used in the United States and elsewhere, which the Church believes demean human “dignity,” and bring humans perilously close to “playing God.” The Church continues to hold steadfast to its key theological proclamation that “life begins at conception,” thereby rendering as “illicit” the use of embryos or fertilized eggs in research or otherwise, including IVF for married Catholic couples wishing to conceive.

Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay, president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry (and author of the book Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogmas) said that “the Vatican has once again manifested its regrettable preference for religious doctrine over science. Until roughly fourteen days after conception, one cannot even meaningfully refer to the embryo as an individual, let alone the equivalent of an adult human, since both twinning and fusion are possible until that point.” Lindsay added that the Vatican’s rejection of IVF on the ground that it results in the discarding of embryos is especially ironic since from 60 to 80 percent of embryos conceived “naturally” are spontaneously aborted. “If the Vatican wants to prevent embryos from ‘dying,’ then they will have to instruct couples to avoid sex completely.

Dignitas Personae is interesting both for the technologies it deplores and the “logic” it bases those judgments upon.

For example, consider intracytoplasmic sperm injection — a procedure whereby a single sperm is injected into an egg to fertilize it. ICSI has a number of purposes, including being used in to overcome male infertility. Dignitas Personae objects to ICSI because it separates procreation from the sexual act,

Just as in general with in vitro fertilization, of which it is a variety, ICSI is intrinsically illicit:  it causes a complete separation between procreation and the conjugal act. Indeed ICSI takes place “outside the bodies of the couple through actions of third parties whose competence and technical activity determine the success of the procedure. Such fertilization entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children. Conception in vitro is the result of the technical action which presides over fertilization. Such fertilization is neither in fact achieved nor positively willed as the expression and fruit of a specific act of the conjugal union”.

Similarly, the objection to genetic engineering comes down to vague and poorly defined concerns,

27. The question of using genetic engineering for purposes other than medical treatment also calls for consideration. Some have imagined the possibility of using techniques of genetic engineering to introduce alterations with the presumed aim of improving and strengthening the gene pool. Some of these proposals exhibit a certain dissatisfaction or even rejection of the value of the human being as a finite creature and person. Apart from technical difficulties and the real and potential risks involved, such manipulation would promote a eugenic mentality and would lead to indirect social stigma with regard to people who lack certain qualities, while privileging qualities that happen to be appreciated by a certain culture or society; such qualities do not constitute what is specifically human. This would be in contrast with the fundamental truth of the equality of all human beings which is expressed in the principle of justice, the violation of which, in the long run, would harm peaceful coexistence among individuals. Furthermore, one wonders who would be able to establish which modifications were to be held as positive and which not, or what limits should be placed on individual requests for improvement since it would be materially impossible to fulfil the wishes of every single person. Any conceivable response to these questions would, however, derive from arbitrary and questionable criteria. All of this leads to the conclusion that the prospect of such an intervention would end sooner or later by harming the common good, by favouring the will of some over the freedom of others. Finally it must also be noted that in the attempt to create a new type of human being one can recognize an ideological element in which man tries to take the place of his Creator.

In stating the ethical negativity of these kinds of interventions which imply an unjust domination of man over man, the Church also recalls the need to return to an attitude of care for people and of education in accepting human life in its concrete historical finite nature.

Leaving for the moment the absurdity of the Catholic Church being suddenly concerned about the “unjust domination of man over man”, the concern about “man trying to take the place of the Creator” is telling.

Of course human beings wouldn’t have to take that route if the Creator hadn’t done such a piss poor job of it in the first place. The Church’s position is that we should simply accept our numerous defects — such as the ridiculously short lifespan — as “God given” and simply not attempt to improve our arbitrary genetic heritage.

My New Year’s Resolution — Less WoW

So 2005 will be known at my house as the year the MMO took over our lives.

Before some students I know engaged in an evil conspiracy to get me to install World of Warcraft, for example, typically I’d have lunch with my wife and we’d talk about our kids or what happened at work, etc.

Today, though a typical lunch goes like this:

Me: Damn. Last night I was in the Blasted Lands with some guildies when one of them aggroed a bunch of mobs and by the time we cleared ’em, some Undead Rogue bastard came and ganked us.

Lisa: Fucking horde. That reminds me of this time in Stranglethorn Vale when a mob debuffed my . . .

…and so on. Seriously, I remember we were getting into it at a Wendy’s and this small group of people was looking at us a table away going WTF?

Fortunately, I’ve finally gotten my character almost to level 60, and once I get to that point I can stop playing this game so damn much.

I can stop at anytime. Really. I just need to log in one more time to, uh, check my auctions. Yeah, that’s it.

Geek Millenarianism and The Singularity

Ray Kurzweil spoke here a few weeks ago, although I missed his speech. I also haven’t read his latest book, The Singularity Is Near, but this review/summary makes it sound like the typical transhumanist rantings.

The idea behind The Singularity is pretty straightforward. We’ve all seen how quickly technology has transformed our lives. Twenty years ago almost nobody owned a personal computer, much less a networked computer. Today, most of us routinely use such technology and often to accomplish tasks for which we previously wouldn’t have imagined we’d even want.

The transhumanists simply extrapolate that trend outward a couple decades. As the pace of improvement in computer processing power and other inevitable discoveries in the biological and physical sciences not only increase but accelerate, we will reach a point where what comes next is impossible to predict in principle (in math and physics a singularity is a point where the normal rules break down — for example, in a physical singularity, such as that hypothesized in black holes, the density of matter is infinite and normal mathematical solutions about space and time are undefined).

So, take computer power. Computer power could grow so fast that at this Singularity, a worldwide sentient computer life form arises and decides to wipe us all out a la The Terminator. Or maybe computer systems spontaneously organize that are able to solve problems that human cognitive limits cannot tackle and our computers start churning out plans for time machines or cornucopia devices (like Star Trek’s replicators on steroids with almost no resource limits to what can be manufactured).

Such ideas make for great science fiction. My personal favorites are the novels of Charles Stross. I just finished Stross’ Iron Sunrise which postulates a self-conscious AI entity which violates causality for its own purposes and works to prevent human beings from doing the same — sort of a benevolent computer demigod.

As I said, this makes great fiction, but when people start to take it seriously as not only a possible, but a likely future, it comes across as a geeky new form of Millenarianism — the ages old belief that the end of the world as we know it is right around the corner.

Part of the problem is that trends are often cited which are interesting and appear to show rapid progress, but also fail to note just how computationally difficult some tasks are, which might throw a bit of a cold shower on just how far ever-increasing computational power will get us (leaving aside the very real possibility of ultimate physical limits on computational power).

For example, the review linked to above and Kurzweil both positively cite the ability of computers that can pretty much defeat all but the most gifted human beings at chess. So far, though, there is no chess computer that can always win at the game against every human being.

And when you start to delve into the computational problems with chess you start to get an idea of how computationally difficult even relatively straightforward problems can be. Ideally, it would be nice to see a computer simply solve chess — i.e., the computer would have access to the tree of all possible moves and be able to determine a position for White that would always win or draw (in much the same way that a simple game like Tic Tac Toe is solved).

Good luck — the decision tree for chess is immense, as in 10^120 possible board positions immense. In contrast, there are believed to be only 10^75 atoms in the universe. If you have a computer the size of the universe with a few billion years to spare working at the problem, then you’ve got a shot at solving chess. Otherwise, forget about it.

It turns out even a relatively simple game such as checkers has an immense decision tree as well and may not be solvable in the forseeable future, though it is probably solvable with enough computer power and enough centuries to churn away at the problem.

For the difficulties in more important research, consider the well-known difficulties in computing protein folding problems even after they are greatly simplified.

There is also the issue of just how much longer the trend of cheaper, faster computing power can be maintained. As Gordon Moore, author of the much-misunderstood Moore’s Law, told TechWorld.Com earlier this year when asked how much longer current trends in increasing computer power could continue,

It can’t continue forever — the nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster approaches. But in terms of size you can see that we’re approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it will be two or generations of chip before we get that far.

Moore is also skeptical of the ability of nanocomputing and similar technologies to grow beyond specialized applications such as for bioanalytic tests.