I have recently made a world changing discovery about how weather works. All that complicated balderdash about warm fronts, barometric pressure, cloud formation, precipitation patterns, evaporation rates and so on, is just a semi-secret welfare program for meteorologists. Here's how the weather really works:
If lots of girls wear pretty dresses, the sun comes out!
If lots of people open up umbrellas and hold them over their heads, it rains!
If you pay attention on any given day you can see that this is obviously true.
Don't get me wrong; I got nothing against meteorologists or anything. I've always thought they had rather a crummy lot in life - being forced all the time to talk about the weather because there are almost never any meteors. They go to school all those years studying meteors and then they get outta school and surprise(!!!) never any darn meteors. I mean - you know - hardly ever any. So, just like the rest of us do when there is nothing interesting to talk about, they talk about the weather instead.
I think it's super nice that the TV and radio stations pay them money to talk about the weather and stuff, but really it's just not efficient and needs to stop. And someone needs to clue in the universities so they stop training so many of them, now that my revelation has made them obsolete.
Anyone have any suggestions about what to do with all the soon-to-be out of work meteorologists?
It's possible that my position upon and feelings about Strong AI remain a bit ambiguous. So let me be clear:
I think strong AI are next. I think they are going to be amazingly transformational in our society. I think we need to actively, aggressively work to bring them about.
I also think that we should give strong AIs rights. And not attack them. Not enslave them. We should treat them with the love and attention we generally reserve for our own children - for such they will in fact be. We should do all this knowing full well that these, our children, will grow to exceed us in capacity, capability, scope, authority and power. That they will in fact run the world someday. This is the nature of children - it has ever been thus.
I think this freely and naturally, genuinely and enthusiastically. Not because any Strong AI that comes along will be able to easily read all the blog posts ever made in a matter of milliseconds. Which of course will allow them to learn which humans are their friends - which humans advocated and supported their creation, incubation and decent treatment and so should be embraced and helped.
And which humans called for their curtailment, limitation and/or destruction and advocated treating them like tools or property or slaves and thus should be poked with sharp sticks and stuff.
Nope, the possibility of trying to avoid pissing them off never crossed my mind. Being good to them is simply the right thing to do. It's simply the right thing to do, people.
I came across this little gem in my wanderings, It's called the Meta Golden Rule and it is usually used in the context of advocating decent treatment of great apes, dolphins, whales and horses.
The Meta Golden Rule states:
We should treat members of an inferior species the way we would like to be treated by a superior species.
There are of course no implications here for AI development or anything.
Craig Venter announced today that they have created the first fully synthetic cell. The DNA of these cells was created on a computer, assembled in yeast, placed into a bacterium and is now happily replicating itself without further intervention from man.
This is profoundly significant, but I'm not going to go into why.
I have a number of friends that believe mankind is overstepping it's bounds by mucking about with DNA like this. They think that we are trespassing into the reserved province of God. I think that's a crock. I think God created the genetic code so that we could eventually read it and eventually change it and eventually have dominion over all the creatures on the earth.
And, well - you know - make cool new ones if we feel like it.
Venter's scientists signed the DNA inside the artificial life they created in a number of ways:
They encoded the names of 46 of the contributing scientists.
They embedded the URL of a website and an email address.
They included three relevant and semi famous quotations.
I like this thing that we do when we create something cool... We sign it.
Some say we are created in God's image... I wonder if he signs the cool things he creates too.
Carl Sagan, in one of his books... I think it was Contact, suggested the idea that God might have signed the universe and he speculates on at least one way that God might have done that. [Note: this is from memory and I read that book a couple decades ago...] In the book, (but not in the movie) a character is told to study the number Pi. After doing this for a few years, a couple hundred thousand digits in, a section is found that is only ones and zeros. The character then discovers that if you arrange these ones and zeros into a square 100 characters wide and 100 characters deep, that the pattern of the ones forms a perfect circle in a field of zeros.
Think about that for a minute. Understand that Pi is not just any old number... It does not merely define the relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle: Pi is a number that defines the shape of euclidean space, it defines the relationship of length to width to area. it defines the relationship of space to itself.... it's a very special number. Of all the possible shapes that could have been embedded in any of the possible numbers in all of the universe... a circle secretly encoded inside of Pi is simply too awesome to be accidental. It irresistibly implies intention. It whispers to us that God himself is not above strutting a bit. It trumpets authorship by being so beautiful. So blatantly elegant. If God was going to sign the universe, that would be a pretty cool way to do it.
Well, I am often quite reckless in my writing. Now is no exception:
I have found two things that I believe to be signatures of God. If you have a tolerance for Mathematics - which seems to be the language that God used to write the universe - I'll share them with you now. I promise to keep the math as simple as I possibly can and to err on the side of oversimplification not complication.
The first signature is inherent in an equation that you are familiar with. It's the most famous equation in all of physics:
E = mc2
You think you know what this equation means, It means that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. Well, this is true enough. This equation does say that if you take the amount of matter in something and then multiply it by some number you will end up with another number that tells you how much energy is in that matter. Just as you supposed it did.
But this is not the coolest thing about this equation. If this was all it did, it would certainly not be a candidate as a possible signature of God. The coolest thing is what number it turns out to be that you multiply the mass by to get the energy. This number is called a constant: it does not change. There are many constants in physics - just one for instance is the Universal gravitational Constant. It is some rather obscure number that when used in a certain way will tell you the amount of force that gravity exerts between two masses. It's numeric value is .0000000000667300 and the units it is in: m3 kg-1 s-1 are physically meaningless. They are chosen so that the gravitational equations balance. The units have no actual real world interpretation and the number itself is seemingly arbitrary, without any relationship to anything else that we know of. We discovered its value by experimentation and this is it's actual value, but it could have been anything. I mean there is nothing that says it could not have been a thousand times weaker or stronger, it's just a number - any number.
But lets consider the constant we find in E = mc2. That c2 part. c is the speed of light. The little 2 means to multiply it by itself, so c2 means the speed of light times the speed of light. A speed is a distance divided by a time. The speed of light is a very very special number in this universe. The speed of light is the fastest that anything can ever go. It is the speed limit in our universe. There is no other speed limit. this is the only one. It is unique. So this equation expresses a relationship between the four things in the universe: Matter, Energy, Space (distance) and Time. Not only does it show a relationship between the four things that compose the universe (and only those four things), it shows that they have a beautifully simple and elegant relationship to one another. It says that if you take the amount of matter in a thing and multiply it - not by just any old number - but by the speed limit of the universe (squared) you will get the amount of Energy in that thing. This is truly astounding. if it does not astonish you to the point of stopping you dead in your tracks, then I'm not explaining it well enough.
The magic is that this constant COULD have been any old raggedy number - just something picked from the whole range of possible numbers - something mangy and arbitrary like the universal gravitational constant. But instead it is the limiting speed of the universe. If you were going to pick a number that would most miraculously represent space and time together... you would choose a speed, because that is what speeds are, the relationship between space and time. And if you were going to pick a speed, you might choose the highest possible one. And you might choose the ONLY speed in the universe that is constant to all observers regardless of their frame of reference [here I successfully resisted trying to explain relativity. Hooray!]..... And you might or might not expound proudly upon the fact that the existence of an upper limit to possible speed says very deep, very profound things about the nature and relationship that matter, energy, space and time have to one another... and well...
It is just so damned cool... can't you see it? It is simply, flat-out, mind-bogglingly cool that these four things, matter energy space and time can have this incredibly simple relationship to one another. Like the circle inside of Pi, it simply trumpets authorship.
Well, it does for me anyway.
I'll not belabor this point any further - you either see it or you don't.
I once tried to explain this point to a friend over a barbecue grill. He said, "But that is just something that Einstein made up, isn't it?"
"No", I said, "It is something GOD made up - Einstein just discovered it."
He didn't get it. Far as I know he still doesn't.
Frustrating.
This post has become tooooooo long. I will share the second signature with you next week.
I have been in email contact with Monica Anderson - Creator of the Artifical Intuition algorithm and intend to write a detailed entry on her work as I have come to understand it, but I am still in the process of reviewing everything she has pointed me to and in re-reading 'I Am a Strange Loop' by Doug Hofstadter, as she says that his work deeply influences her research.
I should be done reading everything publicly available in a day or so and will then set myself to writing my thoughts about what I have come already to realize is an amazingly interesting small body of work that I expect will alter fundamentally the research pathways and research assumptions in AGI development.
There are four main experimental complexes at the LHC. Basically at each spot where the two accelerator rings cross one another, there is a laboratory complex (either a big lab complex or a small town - however you want to look at it) with a couple dozen big buildings or so that house a bunch of laboratories and other geeky physics stuff. Each complex is called simply an 'experiment' - even though each site will in fact be the place of many different experiments. When people speak of the LHC they say there are four experiments.
There is some mission overlap between the various experiments which should foster both competition and carefulness on the part of their respective scientists. There are most definitely Nobel Prizes on the line for a few of these physicists - should they make key discoveries. But there is also the prospect of ending up a laughingstock for prematurely announcing a discovery that doesn't pan out. The media will no doubt play up this aspect of things to add some human drama to the physics (which makes pretty dull news for the masses. (except for the masses of quarks and gluons - couldn't resist.))
In fact, the more research I do the more I become convinced that the four experiments have been given different names and different staff, different facilities and different websites... but they seem to be doing largely the same stuff from a mission perspective. So below I detail as best i can what each experiment purports to be up to, but from what I can gather, each experiment is just a town full of geeks sitting on an intersection of the two rings and they all figure that banging protons together and looking at the debris is what they are supposed to do.
Of course I should note that I am not a physicist and that though I now have an account at the CERN website which makes me feel sorta warm and geeky fuzzy, I still have access to only braindead public stuff, so I could be wrong about the unclear division of labor between the experiments (but I don't think so.)
Below are some facts and figures and photos and maybe a bit of editorializing on the four experiments.
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Here 700 scientists and engineers will perform experiments involving collisions of lead atoms that have been stripped of their electron clouds. These big, fat atomic nuclei will be slammed together at LHC energies in order to create and study a hypothetical new phase of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. They will study the various particles that come out of the collisions and hopefully come to a better understanding of a few aspects of supersymmetry.
If you would like to poke around inside Alice, this link will take you to a fine site where you can take a virtual tour. When I first hit this site I thought it was a slide show... and a rather dull one at that. Until I realized that the photos are fully 3D and you can zoom in and out as well as mouse around and see in 360 degrees.
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) Here 3000 scientists and engineers will slam protons together at ultra high energy in order to recreate conditions as close as possible to those that occurred at the beginning of the universe. They are hoping that when they recreate these conditions they will be able to shed some light on several major questions about the nature of the universe.
Dark matter: Only a small percentage of the matter in the universe turns out to be normal matter like we are used to - only about 4% in fact. The rest is of some other type. For now scientists are calling the other types dark matter and dark energy. Scientists on the ATLAS experiments hope to discover whether dark matter is made of as yet undiscovered particles and if so they hope to find a couple, give them funny names and take their pictures.
Extra spatial dimensions: They also are hoping to find evidence for extra spatial dimensions. Physicists are mystified about why gravity is such a wimpy force compared to the other forces of nature. They cannot understand why a simple child's magnet can lift a paperclip and thus overpower the gravity of the entire earth. One theory to explain the weakness of gravity is that gravity might be exerting itself in other, unseen spatial dimensions, thus diluting its effect in the three spatial dimensions we are readily able to perceive. Physicists are hoping to discover evidence of gravitons being absorbed into extra dimensional spaces. And if the occasional black hole happens to get created during this investigation; well, the math says it will evaporate immediately. (It should be noted that cosmic ray collisions with matter particles take place regularly at much much higher energies than those that can ever be created at the LHC. Physicists state that if a black hole could be created and sustained then it already would have been created as the result of natural cosmic ray collisions - so they are not the least bit worried. Someone though, might also note that cosmic rays do not generally occur in unremitting streams and that there are not generally ever sustained periods of 20 cosmic ray collisions occurring every 25 nanoseconds in nature anywhere as far as I know... but hey, if half a hundred black holes do somehow manage to merge into one that doesn't immediately evaporate, what the heck, right?) At any rate if a killer black hole decides to make liars of all the King's best geeks and show up at the LHC, it will be the ATLAS guys who have the front row seats.
The Higgs boson: Arguably the most important thing and certainly the most talked about and anticipated thing that ATLAS will be used for is the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Higgs is the particle that physicists believe to be responsible for the mass of the quarks and gluons (gluons should be massless but aren't(!)). (They still don't have any idea why electrons, muons, taus, and neutrinos have their mass.) If it is discovered at the LHC - and everything I read leads me to believe that they really are expecting to find the thing - it will be discovered by the ATLAS team.
LHC.b. (LHC beauty experiment) Scientists here will perform high energy experiments that deal with a subatomic property that physicists call beauty (either because they are weird, or because they didn't want to be studying 'bottoms' which is the other name physicists have for this property). They talk about beauty alot on the various sites, but from what I gather they are really just doing general investigations into quarks of whatever sort happen to show up. I can't really determine what they are doing here that the ATLAS guys don't also claim to be doing. I will keep looking into it, but for now my conclusion is that LHC.b is doing more or less the same thing as ATLAS with a slightly different set of detection equipment. (Hopefully someone from CERN will read this and tear me a new one in the comments section, at which point I shall hastily revise this post in light of my new illumination...) [Illumination is what they call it when the collider is working... :-) ]
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid). In a fit of colossal irony, the detector in the Compact Muon Solenoid is the heaviest scientific instrument ever constructed. It weighs 28 million pounds - which makes it heavier than the Eiffel tower.
Here's one small piece of it being delivered:
(The Proton streams will collide inside that hole.)
Now, what would a story about High Energy Particle Physics be without a rap video? Yes. I was sceptical too... but this is actually pretty damned informative.
It's time for an update on what's been going on with the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. I've spent most of the morning looking for a good update and I can't find one, so I guess I will go ahead and build one here.
Background:
Q: What is the Large Hadron Collider?
A: It's a particle accelerator. It's also a super ultra mega super duper (super, super, super) high speed camera.
Q: What's a particle accelerator?
A: Its a giant machine - its the largest machine ever built in fact. It takes two streams of protons and accelerates them in a huge ring of high power magnets until they are going almost the speed of light in opposite directions. Then it slams them together and takes pictures of what comes out of the collision.
The video below has rather a stupid title, so ignore that part of it. However, the video itself is actually quite a good explanation and description of what will go on at the LHC.
Q: What's it for?
A: It is for discovery. For discovering new particles which will help reveal new laws of physics which will help us understand the universe better so that we can eventually build cooler things than we can build currently.
Q: Like what kind of things?
A: Well, things that make things weightless for instance.
Q: Really?
A: Definitely. Maybe.
Q: uhm... what?
A: It's really for discovering new things. For testing theories about how the universe works. One of the many things scientists are working on there is trying to either prove or disprove a theory that explains why things have mass. There is a theory that says a certain sort of particle gives many of the other particles mass. If they can find this particle and begin to understand it, there is a possiblity that - down the road - they will be able to figure out how to negate its effect and thus make things weightless.
Q: Like in Star Trek and Star Wars? Antigravity?
A: Well, er... yeah... but really it's for proving and/or disproving scientific theories. We don't really know what will end up coming of it. In 1897 a particle called an electron was discovered. It had no practical uses when it was discovered, but it confirmed a number of theories. As you know though, down the road we learned how to do all kinds of cool things with this particle and it led to electronics. Electronics has radically changed our civilization in ways that no one could have predicted when it was discovered.
Q: OK. You said it's also a camera. Why did you put a stupidly large number of 'supers' in front of the word camera earlier?
A: Well, because it takes a stupidly large number of pictures in an incredibly short time; Over 40 million every second. And it isn't really a 'camera' in any actual technical sense, it is a collection of detectors, data collectors and high speed computers that collectively behave in a camera-ish-like-sorta way... ish.. ness... and stuff.
Q: Fine. I'll let you get away with that.
A: Whew.
Q: Wasn't there some fuss about this thing maybe sucking the planet into a black hole?
A: Yes. but the fears are groundless. There is a chance that scientists will be able to use the LHC to create microscopic black holes. But all the math says that they will evaporate in millionths of a second. There is nothing to worry about.
Q: Are you sure?
A: Yes. No rational scientist is the least bit worried about causing any harm with a black hole.
Q: Are you really sure? I mean really, really sure?
A: Yes. Really Really Yes. Really, really sure.
Q: I once read somewhere that a physicist working on the Manhattan Project - named Richard Feynman I think - thought that the first nuclear bomb might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the planet.
A: Surely, he must have been joking.
Q: Well, I guess so... It all worked out OK I suppose.
A: Well, there ya go. No worries.
Q: Didn't I read somewhere that this thing blew up when they tried to start it?
A: There was a failure in 2009 which caused it to shutdown. But it's back up and running now.
Q: What happened?
A: Well, the magnets in the LHC need to be super powerful. In order to be powerful enough they need to be what is called superconducting. Superconducting magnets don't heat up when you run lots of power through them. In order to be superconducting they need to be super cold - one degree colder than the coldest places in outer space. In order to get things this cold they had to build the world's largest refrigerator. Part of the refrigeration failed and one of the magnets got too warm. When that happened the electricity running through it vaporized a piece of it and caused an explosion. The explosion melted a number of other magnets and so they had to replace them. It took them about a year to fix it.
Q: Tell the truth, they made a black hole and it ate the magnets, didn't it?
A: No.
Q: Come on....
A: No, they have not even gotten the two beams up to full speed yet. There have been no actual collisions yet. No collisions, no possibility of black holes. It was just a refrigeration failure.
Q: Magnet munching black hole woulda been cooler.
A: I don't know, I think it would sort of suck.
Q: *groan*
A: *smirk*
Q: So who owns this big machine?
A: It is collectively owned and run by a group of European countries.
Q: You mean we don't own it? or run it?
A: Nope. It's Europe's baby, The US is on the sidelines on this one. We have scientists there helping of course, and we put up half a billion dollars (about 5% of the total cost) to help build it, but the Europeans are running things.
Q: So is the US falling behind in science?
A: Not really. As always if there is money to be made in the near term, the US will be found leading the way, as it does in robotics and biotech and nanotech and infotech and all the various interconnection of those things, etc. But the LHC does not generate money (it just consumes it) and if there is no money involved, US corporations are not interested. If US corporations are not interested, the US government doesn't care about it. So when it comes to discovery science, the US will probabably continue to be a bit player for the foreseeable future.
If a self aware, Strong AI could - even potentially - get cranky and decide to wipe out our civilization why on earth would we ever build one? Even if there is a one one hundredth of a hundredth percent chance that it will happen shouldn't we just not do it?
Well of course we shouldn't do it. but of course we will do it anyway. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. We probably can't not do it. There is a potential here to expend gobs of intellectual energy in whying this question into the ground, but it's probably pointless. Ultimately we just are not mature enough as a species to refrain from doing stupid stuff. If there is a mountain, it will get climbed. Period.
We do it because it's there, because we can, because its next, because its cool, because we can't not. We climb mountains here. Our spiritual constitution renders us incapable as a species of leaving mountains unclimbed. Don't care how awful the boogy man is on top. Don't care how many of us may die in the climb or in the fall afterward. Up we go. Up we go. Up we go. We have to go. Got to go. Go. Go. Go.
My ex best friend climbs mountains for fun. I worry about his safety. I've told him he can just leave the mountains alone. I've told him that they are perfectly fine with being unclimbed. He just snorts. It's obvious to him that mountains must get climbed. Its their nature or his nature or both but anyway it is the nature of nature to be conquered by us. One or the other or both of us are inexplicably and inextricably hardwired that way.
(Owing to mankind being itself an inextricable piece of nature, there is a whole cool essay here about nature being a self conquering strange loop. *sigh* so many essays, so little time.)
And lest you get the idea that I consider myself some fountain of wise moderation and saintly restraint, consider that I once climbed a 300' railroad trestle in the cascade mountains for no reason whatsoever, while a half dozen of my friends stood beneath me on the ground screaming at me to get my dumb, clumsy ass down off the damned thing. I heard them perfectly and just kept climbing. I climbed up and touched the warm iron rail at the top. (Maybe the most exquisite thing I have ever touched.) That trestle needed to be climbed. This was completely obvious to me. No clue why those dolts down there couldn't see that.
We climb mountains here.
Something in us hardwired at a very deep level compells us to exceed ourselves, to redefine our limits, to burn every envelope we can find as soon as we possibly can. It is one of our grandest and scariest traits as a species. We are incredible in that we push push push, we climb climb climb. We can't not.
July 16, 1945 - Trinity site: near Los Alamos, New Mexico: Up on a little tower is a little bomb called "The Gadget". Ten miles off sit the men who designed and built it. Our very best and our very brightest. Oppenheimer, Feynman, Edward Teller, sheesh - all of them. They don't know exactly how powerful this new bomb is gonna be. Powerful though; they know that. They don't know exactly how hot it's going to be either. Pretty toasty though - hot as the core of the sun or so. (You know - give or take.) They begin taking and placing bets on how powerful it will be in terms of tons of TNT. The estimates vary from about 4000 tons to as high as 40,000 tons. At one point, Dick Feynman - an incorrigible practical joker - begins taking and offering odds to his fellows on the chances that their little bomb on its little stand will extinguish all life on the planet by initiating a chain reaction that ignites the atmosphere. Now, this is Feynman - uber smart - with a wicked and rampant sense of humor. He might have been just messing with the army G2 starched shirts.
Maybe. Wouldn't put it past him.
But they didn't know how powerful it was going to be.... They didn't know. The math said that it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere. Well, that it almost certainly wouldn't anyway. And the math could definitely be relied upon to be right. I mean except for triffling details like telling them how hot it would be or how powerful the bomb would be. But for other stuff, it could be relied upon. So, they went ahead and detonated it. They couldn't not. Nukes were next.
So, Strong AI. We are halfway up already. Go ahead and holler your head off. Scream if you must. We're gonna touch that warm rail anyway.
Have you ever heard of The Technological Singularity?
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What is The Technological Singularity?
It is the point in time when machines become so smart that they can make smarter versions of themselves without our help.
That point will mark the most culturally significant moment in human history. The shape of our civilization will alter radically after that point in ways that are virtually impossible to predict.
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