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Stephen Wolfram Joins The Life Boat Foundation and Bets On Singularity
kodiaktau writes "This week The Lifeboat Foundation announced that Stephen Wolfram would be joining its organization. The purpose of the group is to think through scientific solutions to existential problems that might be used to save humanity from such risks as asteroids hitting the earth or some other diabolical disaster. Wolfram brings computational science to the table and has posited that the earth and universe can be understood as a computer program that can be significantly altered as we continue to advance in technology."
Like Kurzweil and Co., he's a nut. But a smart nut!
Who said that all progress comes the crazy ones (or something vaguely like that). So maybe they're right (and I'm hoping for it). But (unlike him, lacking a legacy) I wouldn't bet my retirement fund on it.
He pushes the idea that the universe is all built on cellular automata. Not a stupid, ridiculous idea (and also, not his original idea)... but a little bit out there.
Wolfram brings computational science to the table and has posited that the earth and universe can be understood as a computer program that can be significantly altered as we continue to advance in technology.
Sounds a lot like bit-string physics. You might credit John Archibald Wheeler, H. Pierre Noyes, Ted Bastin, C.W. Kilmister, and David McGoveran before Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram is a genius, I'm just not clear what "advancements" he's brought to computational science or bit-string physics. I mean, that "universe as a computer" stuff is all still theory right now, right?
Call me cynical but I fear that this will result in more Futurism with people crossing into other fields of expertise, reading papers and then holding them up as the holy grail in undoing aging and death. Sure, it's amusing but I think at best this is going to be a lot of smart people pounding square pegs into round holes all day long. At worst it's just going to sidetrack people from doing work and daydreaming about interdisciplinary possibilities (like some of the Macy Conferences did for Cybernetics).
Welp, better settle in and prepare for the crazy Kurzweil stories to fire back up!
My work here is dung.
The purpose of the group is to think through scientific solutions to existential problems that might be used to save humanity from such risks as asteroids hitting the earth or some other diabolical disaster.
...or perhaps Global Warming?
And the fact that I wonder whether or not this will be modded as flame bait or troll should be disturbing to all of us.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It's really sad that, if nothing is done about it, the unsustainable economic system that we have right now will lead to a collapse of our technological society long before any asteroid might hit us. The minds behind this project might better be used to solve that conundrum instead...
That is all.
The 3-body problem is easy to solve computationally. It just has no closed-form solution.
Quantum mechanics certainly can be simulated at a low level, it's just too costly a simulation to use to simulate large-scale systems.
A nut? That's hilarious, Wolfram is probably the smartest man alive. Like Da Vinci and others his legacy won't be truly appreciated for centuries. Read NKS and if that doesn't give you some concept of his abilities, well, I don't think anything will convince you.
I'm not really impressed by either. Wolfram made some very good software but then wrote that wretched book which was primarily a mix of either wrong ideas or unoriginal ideas. There was a strong failure to credit the work others had done with cellular automaton. I couldn't tell if that was due to his ignorance or his general self-promotional tendencies.
As to the Lifeboat Foundation I lost minimal trust in them after they got in bed with Pam Geller http://lifeboat.com/ex/boards (yes, that's Pamela "Obama is a Muslim with a Fake Birth Certificate" Geller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Geller#Birther_views). If that weren't enough they've been involved in fear mongering about the LHC http://lifeboat.com/ex/particle.accelerator.shield. There are however other groups that are dealing with exisential risk threats in a serious and useful fashion. The Future of Humanity Institute http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ which is affiliated with the University of Oxford, and headed by the very bright Nick Bostrom thinks about existential risk issues in general. Meanwhile, there are organizations focusing on specific concerns. For example, the B612 Foundation http://www.b612foundation.org/b612/ is focused on dealing with detecting and dealing with large asteroids. They have the advantage of also having a very clever name. Internet cookie to anyone who can figure out why they are called that without searching.
When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
And when you have a 20th-century binary computer, everything looks like a 20th century binary computer program.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Is he saying that the universe can be likened to a computer program or that a computer program can be written which can simulate the universe? Or is he exploring metaphysics and stating that the universe *is* a computer program?
Read up on bit-string physics and digital physics.
... now you can parade in the sci-fi authors. Oh, and Raymond Kurzweil.
I am not a physicist but I would probably try to explain it this way: Information isn't free. We know that. It "costs" something. We can call its most basic unit to be a "bit" but I'm not aware of any really solid equivalences between bits and energy. But if you knew this relationship, you could rewrite a lot of physics with the "bit" as one of the fundamental units of physics and get rid of -- say -- energy. You would represent energy as some complicated set of inequalities or equivalences that are written only with references to bits.
Now let's jump WAY ahead. To the really far out there part. If (and I believe that's a BIG if) you can then express these as Turing machines and you have a complete set of rules to compute with, you're getting closer to building a very accurate (if not perfect) simulator. Gravity, relativity, everything gets bundled up into one neat little Turing Machine that quite simply predicts the future. Perhaps you could simulate atomic movement in vacuums at a fraction of the cost of our current simulator -- and superior (the hope is perfect) accuracy! The final dream, of course, is to simulate the universe perfectly from the Big Bang onward and merely predict the future. It's not hard to see the problems with all of this, however. A simple exercise is to imagine I built this machine yesterday and as the machine begins to compute yesterday and today's events, it's computing itself computing itself computing itself computing itself
My work here is dung.
Global Warming (whether caused by human activity or natural cycles or whatever) is by no means an existential threat to humanity. If worst case scenarios come true it will have a massive socio-political impact as large areas of attractive coastal areas may be threatened and fertile vs un-fertile land (deserts etc) will move around, but that's rather an inconvenience compared to a large meteor impact or some of the other scenarios mentioned in the article. That's not to say that nobody should be concerned about global warming, but it's not what the Lifeboat Foundation is.
There isn't any difference, really.
A computer by a basic definition is a system that operates upon inputs in a defined way. Wolfram definitely believes that the universe is definable.
A computer by a more traditional definition is turing complete, which the universe (by virtue of turing complete systems existing inside of it by the millions/billions) is as well.
The universe is software running on the hardware of physics, in a manner of speaking. This is assuming of course that physics governs the universe, and that the universe didn't create physics. However if you read/watch some of his stuff you'll see that he believes that to be the case (the very end of his TED talk on Alpha he talks about having built some universe simulators).
Look, I know it's a bit far out, but haven't we pretty much concluded even if the Big Rip doesn't happen and that protons don't decay, entropy will eventually cause the heat death of the universe? I mean, I realize that it's around 10^14 years out and won't really be a concern if we can't escape the earth in the next 1.4 billion years or so. Don't get me wrong, I think humanity is perfectly capable of saving itself from asteroid bombardments and the death of stars. But, my (admittedly limited) understanding of what's going to happen to the universe keeps me from really getting excite about projects like this.
On the other hand, the goal here is to make sure we live long enough to face these problems. And that's pretty important.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
He says that computer programs provide a *type* of understanding that was not previously possible because it would take an entire man's life to do the calculations.
A key idea in New Kind of Science is (paraphrased) "Computational Complexity". For special initial settings in the environment, if you keep iterating results *on top of each other* you get patterns of complexity far beyond the initial starting block. For the most obvious example, a "fairly small genome" produces billions of unique people because each day's experience layers on yesterday.
Another key idea is that this resulting complexity can't be shortcutted - there's no single equation (yet!?) that just spits out the pattern, not universally. So the only way to get that output is to do the crunching.
So it does have all kinds of uses - evolution being also among the obvious - you don't get elephants without first having amoebas.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What happens to society when a significant number of people:
- get their power from solar cells and geothermal
- have automated greenhouses (scaled up Aerogardens like the Aero Grow folks make) which provide much of their food needs (anyone run the numbers on how much seaweed one could grow in a tank the size of a typical house window?)
- make tchochkes (and small useful objects as well) using a makerbot or reprap or diylilcnc
- capture rainwater and filter / purify it, use grey water for washing and minimize their sewer bill w/ a composting toilet
Bonus points for those who are able to use excess energy to generate hydrogen which is then used to power their vehicles.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
If the Universe IS doing calculations, then it is as accurate as possible. You can't possibly get closer to calculating what the laws of physics say should happen than by the calculation actually being what actually does happen.
But that means the universe is either infinite, to hold infinitely long registers, or the real laws of physics don't include any infinite precision expressions. A finite universe can't, for a simple example, be multiplying some number times Pi, an infinite non-repeating decimal. Since non-truncating values are used in a tremendous number of physics formulas, the math we think describes the Universe can't possibly be what a finite Universe is using.
There are ways to keep physics related math from entailing any infinities. Planck's work,setting a minimum size for movement and duration for actions, is an example. Maybe, there will eventually be a Grand Theory of Everything, or Unified Field Theory, with no pesky infinities. But it's interesting that, if the Universe IS in some sense a computer, then a finite Universe simply HAS to have something like Quantum Mechanics, because time and space can't be infinitely divisible.
To a mathematician, the fact that QM seems to work isn't a rigorous proof that the Universe is indeed finite - all we can say for sure is that if the Universe allows infinities, then a QM like theory isn't strictly necessary. To a cosmologist, dimensions such as the Planck length are pretty strong suggestions that the Universe is finite, and that a GTU or UFT or whatever will eventually be found if we are only smart enough.
Who is John Cabal?
The 3-body problem is easy to solve computationally. It just has no closed-form solution.
Quantum mechanics certainly can be simulated at a low level, it's just too costly a simulation to use to simulate large-scale systems.
I knew this guy once... he told me the 3-body problem was that "someone is always left out".
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
While I agree that this fact is astounding and very interesting, it certainly wasn't him that made this observation first.
Mod parent up. One of the girls always gets mad.
A finite universe can't, for a simple example, be multiplying some number times Pi, an infinite non-repeating decimal
Sure, it can. You don't have to know pi to infinite digits in order to use it mathematically. There's no reason a finite universe can't compute using pi.
The problem is how long can they stay in the bunker and how long will global warming last.
You may want to ponder what energy sources they will use to power their bunker, and for how long that is possible. Also notice that there is the usual decay of mechanical systems through friction and other problems, so you need certain resources to maintain the bunker, also recycling isn't perfect, so after all you may need more energy/resources than you think.
Over all I might agree with you, they won't need to stay in the bunker that long, 100 years might be enough to get past the die off phase where the 7 billion are reduced by an order of magnitude.
Personally, I'm more interested in getting society ready to deal with the coming mess and getting it through with population control and whatever necessary, just because we don't do things because they are easy but because they are hard.
Also you should ponder the situation of the buried, they went under ground because of some silly asteroid or terrorist threat and will find out that the forest area they saw last has become some sort of desert, and then they will have to walk a few hundred kilometers north or south, until they find the next oasis. Dealing with that lie will suck!
All the other lies will pale in comparison though.
Just to top it off, I read a book some time ago printed in 1936 in Germany called "Gloria", it also dealt with asteroids but was a preparation for the autarchy that WW2 required.
Je me souviens.
His deep insight that true chaos devolves from ordered deterministic processes (e.g. cellular automatia) across all of nature is nothing short of astounding
This is pretty much what everybody already knew since the 80's, and the investigation of chaos theory and iterative algorithms. It's important to know, but by now I'd look askance at any scientist who didn't accept this decades ago.
Interesting post, a couple of minor thoughts though:
Pi and such aren't needed for the calculations of the universe, nor do you need infinite registers. Pi and other numbers that describe ratios and the like are products of the universe's calculations. We use those numbers because they are in fact useful to us and our understanding but they are merely part of the outcome and don't actually need to be in the method/function that's running. As for infinite registers, the universe itself is the computer: both processor and memory. The function runUniverse() only needs to run locally and let the efforts spread to the rest volumetrically like a sphere expanding at the speed of light through the dataset (or, space/matter). It doesn't require exterior storage.
Just my 2 cents
(cents, not the symbol since slashdot still can't even display extended ascii?)
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
Global Warming (whether caused by human activity or natural cycles or whatever) is by no means an existential threat to humanity.
Depends on how you define humanity. If you mean homo-sapiens continuing to exist in numbers of a few tens of millions or more, then, no, global warming won't wipe us out the way a massive asteroid or gamma ray burst would.
If, on the other hand, you take the Jim Morrison quote "I want to get my kicks in before the whole shithouse goes up in flames," to talk about the end of humanity as the end of being able to live in a shelter without worry for your safety, the ability to easily secure food for the winter... global warming could do that a whole lot easier than the Vietnam war ever could.
Wolfram pushes his principle of computational equivalence which says that anything you can find in one discrete system you can find in any other (which can be shown to emulate a universal Turing machine). His preference for 1D and Conway's, my and others' preference for 2D cellular automata for exploring some of that space is much more a statement about human visual perception. He actually suggests that a simple graph (formal math term for network of nodes and links) is a more likely candidate, but they are much harder to get your head (and your algorithms) around.
Personally I find his strong notion of computational equivalence only distracts from the need to find smarter exploration strategies in a space of boundless possibility, although it has some value as a "weak" principle analogous to the weak anthropic principle.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.