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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."
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.