I have long been interested in using Forth as the infrastructure for other languages, for example Squeak Smalltalk. However, when I have looked into this, it seems that fairly complex environments like Lisp or Smalltalk or Python with garbage collection and other features tend to want to have a certain infrastructure of their own -- a dedicated VM in that sense. There is also a performance hit unless the Forth system effectively just bootstraps itself out of the way. Especially in the context of Forth chips, what can you tell us about the promises and perils of other languages running on top of Forth? Are there ports of any other languages to your Forth chips?
Historically, Forth started out as more or less "open source" code embodying a set of elegant and powerful ideas. In the late 1970s/early 1980s there was controversy on whether the public domain Forths were killing the commercial vendors and at the same time giving novices a bad experiences using incomplete systems compared to more complete commercial solutions. What is your current feeling about open source / free software, especially as it relates to the past, present, and future of Forth? Do you think the open source nature of Forth has helped or hurt it in the long run?
When I program with Forth I find myself having to write and read a lot of comments that document the intent of data movements on the stack. Languages like C where most data is stored in named variables lend themselves to writing more self documenting code because the name of each variable helps document the intent of how the data in it is used (e.g. "loopCounter"). That documentation of intent is lost when writing code that just does stack manipulations in Forth (thus the need for comments, such as descriptions of what is on the stack at any given time). Of course, you can use variables in Forth, but that defeats the elegance of using the stack. Do you have any comments on this issue or recommendations for making self documenting Forth programs with a minimum of explicit comments about intent?
While someone involved may mean well, the fee is $1150 per package to the general public.
http://www-rsicc.ornl.gov/ORDER.html In the internet age that doesn't sound "nominal" to me for casual use or education. The license also does not allow redistribution or making derivative works. This is our tax dollars at work? How do they justify these fees or prevention of derivative works? How can an independent scientist afford to verify the workings of these code packages to see that the assumptions in them are reasonable? My opinion is all publicly funded content should be released under a free license (copyleft or not), although I acknowledge that rights of privacy, authors moral rights, and national security issues should also be respected.
Thanks for the kind words. Yes, it seems doing the rational thing (for the community) will probably be the last resort (at least, hopefully).
For replacing petroleum, one needs to distinguish between "liquid" fuels and "fossil" fuels. Fossil fuels are ultimately limited and using them releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Liquid fuels (alcohol from corn, liquified hydrogen, even synthesized gasoline) are a convenient way to store and transport power regardless of their source (fossil fuels or synthesis). They can be produced by several methods -- typically involving taking CO2 temporarily from the atmosphere and then releasing it back as the liquid is burned or reacted in a fuel cell. There may be energy inefficiencies in producing, say, methanol entirely with electricity used to liquify CO2 from the atmosphere, but there is always biomatter production through liquifying corn stalks, tapping some weeds that produce oily resins, and such. There are also alternatives such as using metal powders that oxidize to produce power.
I have no worry about convenient portable power alternatives if people start applying themselves to the task. I'm personally more worried about arms races (corporate, nanotech, AI, etc.) driven in part by a (out-of-date) resource scarcity mentality. Rather than spending limited attention and funds defending the Persian Gulf oil supplies, I think the U.S. military should be defending the U.S.A. against arms races (not winning them mind you -- preventing them).
I question what general statement one can make from the figures at: http://dieoff.com/pv.htm First, the projection is for a large facility in Texas, with lots of concrete and so forth, so that is not the same as, say, roof mounted solar shingles, solar ponds, PV roadways (suggested by another respondant), or other methods of collecting solar energy. Second, much of the energy cost in that study is attributed to operation and maintenance, and one would think those could be reduced with research, and I also question how those are derived. Third, some of the figures are from 10 years ago (1991) and PV efficiency has more than doubled since then (using techniques like multi-layer films and films with certain sculpted surfaces). Fourth, I did not see a reference to the expected life time of the structure, which seems an integral factor in doing the analysis. So, I don't think one can look at one study and make such a sweeping conclusion about all ground based solar power.
While I don't agree with aspects of this other study (pro-nuke), it suggests a 5-10 for 1 return on energy investment in PV. http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm Personally, I feel wind, PV, and increased energy efficiency can supply all our power needs. Remember, over 1% of the US land area is already taken up with space used for power production, between power line right of ways, mines, related roadways, and so forth.
The only energy crisis I see is one of ignorance, vested interests, and lack of imagination. Personally, I would rather see land based solutions than space onces because I would prefer the political implications of decentralized ground based power over centralized space based power. I think there are reasons to develop self-replicating space habitats (mostly just as fun places to live for trillions of people, and as refugia in case bad things happen on Earth for whatever reason), but beaming energy back to Earth is not a major one.
The real benefits of asteroid mining...
on
On Asteroid Mining
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· Score: 1
Practically speaking, there are plenty of materials to go around on Earth for the near future. Mining landfills is one option, as is doing more with less with better materials technology. Anything can be recycled if you have enough energy (which various renewable sources could provide.)
The real benefits of asteroid mining will be to make self-replicating cities in space. These will allow a diversity of human-derived cultures to flourish.
What will be of value in the space frontier is using the energy from the sun and matter from the asteroids to build space cities or space habitats. These will provide homes for trillions of ideas. The wealth that will flow back to Earth won't be material -- it will be spiritual (new dreams), intellectual (new designs), and political (peacemaking).
Such habitats will also provide a place for misfits to go -- as the American frontier was for a time -- letting the Earth settle down.
To create a space city that can self-replicate from asteroidal ore and sunlight will take a better understanding of manufacturing and how webs of manufacturing processes fit together.
5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/ http://www.drcnet.org/facts/
11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain. http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)
12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc. http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br>
Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job. http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l
When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away). http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml
My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities. http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity.ht ml http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/
Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in. http://www.idealist.org/
There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans. http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/199 9/number_3/machine399.html;
Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.
It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.
Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.
At a space conference about a year and a half ago (SSI conference on Space Manufacturing), I had a chance to talk with the JPL lab peopel in charge of the NASA robotics program. The head and staff was very pro-Mars.
Some people at NASA from a generation raised on planetary
sci-fi just doesn't get it. Colonizing the surface of
the Moon would create a habitable area equal to Africa.
Colonizing Mars would produce a habitable area with
a surface area equal to Earth's land masses (not including
ocean surface). Sure, do it someday for fun, but not first.
NASA should instead invest the bulk of its R&D in creating one
self-replicating space habitat that could
duplicate itself using only sunlight and asteroidal ore. If
duplicating once per year in a hundred years such a
habitat and its offspring would produce thousands of times the
habitable surface of the Earth, enough to support
trillions of humans and large populations of other species.
Remember: a planet is a very wasteful way to use mass. It is
much more efficient to use shells to contain
atmosphere. If you wan't gravity, just spin it. If you don't
want gravity, live in bubbles.
NASA should take on the responsibility of educating the public about humankind's future in space, not pandering to old obsolete notions in an effort to get funding.
Some people at NASA from a generation raised on planetary sci-fi just doesn't get it. Colonizing the surface of the Moon would create a habitable area equal to Africa. Colonizing Mars would produce a habitable area with a surface area equal to Earth's land masses (not including ocean surface). Sure, do it someday for fun, but not first.
NASA should instead invest the bulk of its R&D in creating one self-replicating space habitat that could duplicate itself using only sunlight and asteroidal ore. If duplicating once per year in a hundred years such a habitat and its offspring would produce thousands of times the habitable surface of the Earth, enough to support trillions of humans and large populations of other species.
Remember: a planet is a very wasteful way to use mass. It is much more efficient to use shells to contain atmosphere. If you wan't gravity, just spin it. If you don't want gravity, live in bubbles.
I think your question of "Do human-level AI's deserve some level of human rights?" is very important. It would have been nice to also ask him about the ethics of enslaving artificial minds.
There's a Star Trek TNG episode on this where some Starfleet cyberneticist wants to disassemble Commander Data so he can duplicate him and basically create a race of slaves. The action is only stopped by Picard pointing out the immorality of this.
Jordan wrote: "But the SF ideal of a humanoid robot like Commander Data is centuries away." So based on that he can ignore the ethical implications as somebody else's problem. But Moravec, Kurzweil, and Joy all think this issue will likely confront us (in a different form perhaps) in the next twenty or so years. There is a fundamental diagreement here on time scales for human-level AI development.
... is to accept the risk of these technologies and work on ways to use technology to sustain life in the face of the worst possibilities. This includes developing self-replicating space habitats. My worry about Bill Joy's line of thinking is that it will prevent the development of good self-replicating systems while still allowing clandestine and competetive development of bad ones. Yet his line of thinking will be well received because it fits in well with the current human software power structure -- let's freeze everything at Windows 2000 and JDK 2.0 for the next twenty years while we study the problem...
If the US Department of Defense (DOD) and related National Security Apparatus was worth the $300+ billion dollars spent on it every year, it would be working hard to make true defenses to these technological threats. And that means developing better kinds of technology to defend and preserve life in the universe -- like closed ecosystems, wearable self-powered libraries and network communicators, and flexible manufacturing and mining systems. Too bad the military is investing so heavily in refighting the last wars... The point is to act now, rather than worry about the threats if they emerge. They may not, but if one extended the same logic to the military, why spend a trillion dollars a year worldwide on arms to defend against imagined wars not yet in progress?
We have been living under a technological sword of Damocles for so long (at least fifty years of nulcear weapons as just one example) that we have forgotten as a society how serious these issues are and the risks we still run daily with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads ready for launch. Now the argument is made if it hasn't happened yet, we obviously are doing everything right and more threats will also be handled well. We don't want to face that we are rolling the dice every year.
My parents lived through World War II. Wars happen. Bad ones. People die because of failures to plan or follow through, or because of people's greed, or because of mass hysteria. Many of today's technical people are so out of touch with that reality... They say wars start when people forget the last one. WW II is now forgotten. Yet, we still need to plan for the worst. Not because a nanowar or machine war will happen, but because it might and preparing to prevent it or to survive it is the right thing to do.
If we are worried about far out futuristic threats (self-replicating spiritual machines programmed by nasty people), we must consider working hard toward far out futuristic solutions (self-replicating space habitats programmed by nice people).
We need to reorder our priorities as a society from defending against the known threats to defending against the threat of "technological uncertainty" itself.
I agree with you that it is hard to estimate the level of computation done by various organic brains. Moravec goes into this to some extent in his book. At best, one might say what sort of computer power it would take to simulate the neural workings of a spider, or other creature. There is some debate over the computational power required to simulate the human brain. However, even if the organic brain equivalent figures are off by a factor of 1000, that only delays the issue for 10 years (given the accelerating rate of increase...). If the estimate is off by 1,000,000 times, this just delays things to 2040.
Many of Kurzweil's points are similar to Bill Joy's. The difference is the conclusion. Kurzweil has a rosy view that we will be able to download ourselves into the network. If you disagree that this is plausible, then his book defines a similar extinction scenario as Bill Joy's comments.
In my opinion, Kurweil's analysis of the evolutionary dynamics of a world wide web of downloaded humans is flawed because it ignores fundamental aspects of ecology and evolution. Specifically, here are two issues about his conclusion: a) it assumes humans in a different environment will still act human with classical human motivations (as opposed to dissolve into an unrecognizable set of bits or simply locking in a pleasure loop) because to a large extent environment elicits behavior, and b) it ignores evolution and its implications in the digital realm (especially the enhanced pace of evolution in such a network and the implications for survival). Of these, the most important is (b).
Evolution is a powerful process. Humans have evolved to fit a niche in the world -- given a certain environment which includes a 3D reality and various other organisms (including humans). Humans have an immune systems (both mental and physical) capable of dealing with common intellectual and organismal pathogenic threats in their environment. There is no easy way to translate this to success in a digital environment, because the digital environment will imply different rewards and punishments for various behavior, and evolve predators and parasites which these immune systems have never been exposed to before. Human style intelligence is valuable in a human context for many reasons -- but sophisticated intelligence is not necessarily a key survival feature in other niches (say, smaller ones the size of roaches, hydra or bacteria). In short, the human way of thinking will be inadequate for survival in the digital realm. Even augmented minds that are connected to the network will face these threats and likely be unable to survive them. Kurzweil discusses the importance of anti-viral precautions in his book, but I think he is rosily optimistic about this particular aspect.
At best, one might in the short term construct digital environments for digital humans to live in, and defend these environments. However, both digitized human minds and immensely larger digitized human worlds will be huge compared to the smallest amount of code that can be self replicating. These digital "bacteria" will consume these digital human minds and worlds because the human minds and worlds will be constructed, not evolved. Human minds will be at a competitive disadvantage with smaller, quicker replicating code. Nor will there be any likelihood of a meaningful merger of human mind with these evolved and continually evolving patterns.
I could endlessly elaborate on this theme, but in short -- I find it highly unlikely that any mind designed to work well in meatspace will be optimal for cyberspace. It will be overwhelmed and quickly passed by in an evolutionary sense (and consumed for space and runtime). It is likely this will happen within years of digitization (but possibly minutes or hours or seconds). As an example experiment, create large programs (>10K) in Ray's Tierra and see how long they last! http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/tier ra/tierra.html
Our best human attempts at designing digital carriers (even using evolutionary algorithms) will fail because of the inherent uncompetetiveness of clunky meatspace brain designs optimized for one environment and finding themselves in the digital realm. For a rough analog, consider how there is an upper limit of size to active creatures in 3D meatspace for a certain ecology. While something might survive somehow derived from pieces of a digitized person, it will not resemble that person to any significant degree. This network will be an alien environment and the creatures that live in it will be an alien life form. One might be able to negotiate with some of them at some point in their evolution citing the commonality of evolved intelligence as a bond -- but humanity may have ceased to exist by then.
In short, I agree with the exponential theme in Kurzweil's book and the growth of a smart network. We differ as to the implication of this. I think people (augmented or not) will be unable to survive in that digital world he predicts for any significant time period. Further, digital creatures inhabiting this network may be at odds or indifferent to human survival, yet human civilization will likely develop in such a way that it is dependent on this network. The best one can hope for in the digital realm is "mind children" with little or no connection to the parents -- but the link will be as tenuous as a person's relation to a well cultivated strain of Brewer's yeast, since the most competetive early digital organisms will be tiny.
Once you start working from that premise -- the impossibility of people surviving in the digital world of 2050, then Kurweil's book becomes a call to action, just like Bill Joy's comments. I don't think it is possible to stop this process for all the reasons both people mention. It is my goal to create a technological alternative to this failure scenario. That alternative is macroscopic self-replicating (space) habitats. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak However, they are no panacea. Occupants of such habitats will have to continually fight the self-replicating and self-extending network jungle for materials, space, and power. (Sounds like the making of a sci-fi thriller...) And they may well fail against the overwhelming odds of an expanding digital network without conscience or morality. Just look at Saberhagen's Beserker series http://www.berserker.com/ or the Terminator movies.
It will be difficult for Kurweil to change his opinion on this because he have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. He was making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in his book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt.
You are correct of course; systems designed to act must have something (like behavioral rules) causing the actions.
The issue is evolution. Even if you design a system to do one thing, if it has the capacity to evolve (or even learn), then the behavior may eventually change to be other than what the original designers intended -- to be instead behavior shaped by various evolutionary pressures. Consider the situation you describe of "it's going to be destroyed if it hurts anyone". Assume this principle is applied to millions of systems or varying designs which can learn. Some of these systems hurt people and are destroyed, and some of them don't hurt people and are duplicated. In this situation, systems might evolve that (A) reliably don't hurt anyone, (B) reliably hurt people without it being obvious, or (C) just once subvert or destroy the enforcer of that situation, and then continue to evolve in various directions.
This is the problem with Asimov's "three laws of robotics". In fact, in one of his stories (I forget which), he points it out at the end when basically two of the robots (while switched off!) decide they are superior or "more human" than the organic humans for various reasons. So even though they are still bound by the three laws in this case, the definition of "human" has changed -- to the robot's advantage. The implications of this are not worked out though.
Life in a tin can will almost always be noisy. But space habitats don't have to be tin cans.
For example, consider the bubble designs by Michael Savage, consisting of a large air filled bubble, a layer of plastic, six feet of water (for cosmic ray shielding) and another layer of plastic (gold coated to control glare). http://www.luf.org/bin/vie w/GIG/GalacticInformationGuide http://www.luf.org/
NASA needs to get over its fascination on building tin can space ships to go to planets (and tin can space stations to support that). It needs to start researching and doing civil engineering in space -- making new land and cities in space. http://www.spaceandrobotics.org/debate.h tm
He is involved somehow with Spacewatch (a program at the University of Arizona, led by Dr. Tom Gehrels) which has done much of the pioneering work in the field of NEO detection. http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/asterimp.h tml
Cynthia put four person-years of work into this product (unpaid), which is released under the GPL. A year of that time was spent in a dark apartment in Des Moines, Iowa translating convoluted USDA soil science modeling equations from spaghetti Fortran to C++ and then Delphi. She then wrote an incredible help system and documentation, which serves as a major GPL'd reference work on soil science and agricultural modelling. Her persistance in finishing the project in the face of discouragement and isolation was awesome.
Because this software is in Delphi and is an end-user application, it hasn't really attracted much attention by the Open Source community. It has however been downloaded by thousands of people around the globe to learn more about how to grow food sustainably. Hopefully, if Borland/Inprise releases Delphi for Linux as planned, this software might become an important Linux application.
(Disclaimer: This award nomination is a bit self-serving since I put two person-years in on that project too, and Cynthia is my wife.)
Slashdot Mirror
I have long been interested in using Forth as the infrastructure for other languages, for example Squeak Smalltalk. However, when I have looked into this, it seems that fairly complex environments like Lisp or Smalltalk or Python with garbage collection and other features tend to want to have a certain infrastructure of their own -- a dedicated VM in that sense. There is also a performance hit unless the Forth system effectively just bootstraps itself out of the way. Especially in the context of Forth chips, what can you tell us about the promises and perils of other languages running on top of Forth? Are there ports of any other languages to your Forth chips?
Historically, Forth started out as more or less "open source" code embodying a set of elegant and powerful ideas. In the late 1970s/early 1980s there was controversy on whether the public domain Forths were killing the commercial vendors and at the same time giving novices a bad experiences using incomplete systems compared to more complete commercial solutions. What is your current feeling about open source / free software, especially as it relates to the past, present, and future of Forth? Do you think the open source nature of Forth has helped or hurt it in the long run?
When I program with Forth I find myself having to write and read a lot of comments that document the intent of data movements on the stack. Languages like C where most data is stored in named variables lend themselves to writing more self documenting code because the name of each variable helps document the intent of how the data in it is used (e.g. "loopCounter"). That documentation of intent is lost when writing code that just does stack manipulations in Forth (thus the need for comments, such as descriptions of what is on the stack at any given time). Of course, you can use variables in Forth, but that defeats the elegance of using the stack. Do you have any comments on this issue or recommendations for making self documenting Forth programs with a minimum of explicit comments about intent?
While someone involved may mean well, the fee is $1150 per package to the general public. http://www-rsicc.ornl.gov/ORDER.html In the internet age that doesn't sound "nominal" to me for casual use or education. The license also does not allow redistribution or making derivative works. This is our tax dollars at work? How do they justify these fees or prevention of derivative works? How can an independent scientist afford to verify the workings of these code packages to see that the assumptions in them are reasonable? My opinion is all publicly funded content should be released under a free license (copyleft or not), although I acknowledge that rights of privacy, authors moral rights, and national security issues should also be respected.
For replacing petroleum, one needs to distinguish between "liquid" fuels and "fossil" fuels. Fossil fuels are ultimately limited and using them releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Liquid fuels (alcohol from corn, liquified hydrogen, even synthesized gasoline) are a convenient way to store and transport power regardless of their source (fossil fuels or synthesis). They can be produced by several methods -- typically involving taking CO2 temporarily from the atmosphere and then releasing it back as the liquid is burned or reacted in a fuel cell. There may be energy inefficiencies in producing, say, methanol entirely with electricity used to liquify CO2 from the atmosphere, but there is always biomatter production through liquifying corn stalks, tapping some weeds that produce oily resins, and such. There are also alternatives such as using metal powders that oxidize to produce power.
I have no worry about convenient portable power alternatives if people start applying themselves to the task. I'm personally more worried about arms races (corporate, nanotech, AI, etc.) driven in part by a (out-of-date) resource scarcity mentality. Rather than spending limited attention and funds defending the Persian Gulf oil supplies, I think the U.S. military should be defending the U.S.A. against arms races (not winning them mind you -- preventing them).
While I don't agree with aspects of this other study (pro-nuke), it suggests a 5-10 for 1 return on energy investment in PV. http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm Personally, I feel wind, PV, and increased energy efficiency can supply all our power needs. Remember, over 1% of the US land area is already taken up with space used for power production, between power line right of ways, mines, related roadways, and so forth.
The only energy crisis I see is one of ignorance, vested interests, and lack of imagination. Personally, I would rather see land based solutions than space onces because I would prefer the political implications of decentralized ground based power over centralized space based power. I think there are reasons to develop self-replicating space habitats (mostly just as fun places to live for trillions of people, and as refugia in case bad things happen on Earth for whatever reason), but beaming energy back to Earth is not a major one.
The real benefits of asteroid mining will be to make self-replicating cities in space. These will allow a diversity of human-derived cultures to flourish.
What will be of value in the space frontier is using the energy from the sun and matter from the asteroids to build space cities or space habitats. These will provide homes for trillions of ideas. The wealth that will flow back to Earth won't be material -- it will be spiritual (new dreams), intellectual (new designs), and political (peacemaking).
Such habitats will also provide a place for misfits to go -- as the American frontier was for a time -- letting the Earth settle down.
To create a space city that can self-replicate from asteroidal ore and sunlight will take a better understanding of manufacturing and how webs of manufacturing processes fit together.
Links: /sp acsetl.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
1. Open source library of knowledge for developing nations (making the world's intellectual wealth available to all) .or g/globalprojects/humcdrom/copyrigh.htm
http://www.oneworld.org/globalp roj ects/humcdrom/
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/& lt;/a>
http://www.oneworld
http://payson.tulane.edu:8888/
; http://www.globalprojects.org/
; http://www.humanitylibraries.net/ http://www.villageearth.org/
http://www.villageearth.org/ATLi bra ry/cdrom.htm
2. Open source knowledge management systems /
http://www.bootstrap.org/
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/ar chi ves.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion
3. Self-replicating space habitats (support trillions of humans in style without overrunning the earth) /sp acsetl.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
4. Pursue the "Ecocity Berkley" vision in the book by that name by Richard Register and look for related visions of sustainable development .htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob ido s/ASIN/1556430094/
http://www.co-intelligence.or g/y 2k_commtyorgs.html
http://www.fuzzylu.com/greencenter/h ome
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sust vl. html
http://www.rmi.org/
5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/
http://www.drcnet.org/facts/
6. Teaching tolerance and compassion
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splcenter.or g/t eachingtolerance/tt-index.html
7. Open source educational simulations and simulation construction toolkits (one of the most meaningful ways to use computers in the classroom). .co m/edusims.html
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://riceinfo.ri ce. edu/armadillo/Simulations/simserver.html
http://www.creativeteachingsite
http://www.workingmodel.com/
http://www.idsia.ch/~andrea/simtools.h tml
8. Preserving biodiversity (when it's gone, it's gone forever)o nment/library/weekly/aa091700.htm
http://www.tnc.org/
http://www.environment.about.com/newsissues/envir
9. Develop any specific sustainable technology in energy (e.g. solar), recycling (e.g. recycle computers), materials (e.g. plastics from starch), society (e.g. participatory democracy & social justice).
http://www.google.com/sear ch? q=sustainable+technology
http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.htm l
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/
10. Make corporations more accountable to human needsl ty&hl=en
http://www.adbusters.org/inform ati on/foundation/
http://www.adbusters.org/c amp aigns/charter/death.html
Previous link vanished, try instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.adbuste rs.org/ campaigns/charter/death.html+corporate+death+pena
http://www.cwsl.edu/news/n_corpo rat e_death.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/340& lt;br> http://www.chaordic.org/
11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain.
http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)
12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc.
http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br> Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job.
http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l
When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away).
http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m
http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml
My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities. .ht ml
http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity
http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/ http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/ http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/
Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in.
http://www.idealist.org/
There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans.
9 9/number_3/machine399.html ;
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/19
Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.
It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.
Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.
Some people at NASA from a generation raised on planetary sci-fi just doesn't get it. Colonizing the surface of the Moon would create a habitable area equal to Africa. Colonizing Mars would produce a habitable area with a surface area equal to Earth's land masses (not including ocean surface). Sure, do it someday for fun, but not first.
NASA should instead invest the bulk of its R&D in creating one self-replicating space habitat that could duplicate itself using only sunlight and asteroidal ore. If duplicating once per year in a hundred years such a habitat and its offspring would produce thousands of times the habitable surface of the Earth, enough to support trillions of humans and large populations of other species.
Remember: a planet is a very wasteful way to use mass. It is much more efficient to use shells to contain atmosphere. If you wan't gravity, just spin it. If you don't want gravity, live in bubbles.
NASA should take on the responsibility of educating the public about humankind's future in space, not pandering to old obsolete notions in an effort to get funding.
Related links: /sp acsetl.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
Some people at NASA from a generation raised on planetary sci-fi just doesn't get it. Colonizing the surface of the Moon would create a habitable area equal to Africa. Colonizing Mars would produce a habitable area with a surface area equal to Earth's land masses (not including ocean surface). Sure, do it someday for fun, but not first.
NASA should instead invest the bulk of its R&D in creating one self-replicating space habitat that could duplicate itself using only sunlight and asteroidal ore. If duplicating once per year in a hundred years such a habitat and its offspring would produce thousands of times the habitable surface of the Earth, enough to support trillions of humans and large populations of other species.
Remember: a planet is a very wasteful way to use mass. It is much more efficient to use shells to contain atmosphere. If you wan't gravity, just spin it. If you don't want gravity, live in bubbles.
Related links: /sp acsetl.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
I think your question of "Do human-level AI's deserve some level of human rights?" is very important. It would have been nice to also ask him about the ethics of enslaving artificial minds.
There's a Star Trek TNG episode on this where some Starfleet cyberneticist wants to disassemble Commander Data so he can duplicate him and basically create a race of slaves. The action is only stopped by Picard pointing out the immorality of this.
Jordan wrote: "But the SF ideal of a humanoid robot like Commander Data is centuries away." So based on that he can ignore the ethical implications as somebody else's problem. But Moravec, Kurzweil, and Joy all think this issue will likely confront us (in a different form perhaps) in the next twenty or so years. There is a fundamental diagreement here on time scales for human-level AI development.
If the US Department of Defense (DOD) and related National Security Apparatus was worth the $300+ billion dollars spent on it every year, it would be working hard to make true defenses to these technological threats. And that means developing better kinds of technology to defend and preserve life in the universe -- like closed ecosystems, wearable self-powered libraries and network communicators, and flexible manufacturing and mining systems. Too bad the military is investing so heavily in refighting the last wars... The point is to act now, rather than worry about the threats if they emerge. They may not, but if one extended the same logic to the military, why spend a trillion dollars a year worldwide on arms to defend against imagined wars not yet in progress?
We have been living under a technological sword of Damocles for so long (at least fifty years of nulcear weapons as just one example) that we have forgotten as a society how serious these issues are and the risks we still run daily with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads ready for launch. Now the argument is made if it hasn't happened yet, we obviously are doing everything right and more threats will also be handled well. We don't want to face that we are rolling the dice every year.
My parents lived through World War II. Wars happen. Bad ones. People die because of failures to plan or follow through, or because of people's greed, or because of mass hysteria. Many of today's technical people are so out of touch with that reality... They say wars start when people forget the last one. WW II is now forgotten. Yet, we still need to plan for the worst. Not because a nanowar or machine war will happen, but because it might and preparing to prevent it or to survive it is the right thing to do.
If we are worried about far out futuristic threats (self-replicating spiritual machines programmed by nasty people), we must consider working hard toward far out futuristic solutions (self-replicating space habitats programmed by nice people).
We need to reorder our priorities as a society from defending against the known threats to defending against the threat of "technological uncertainty" itself.
I agree with you that it is hard to estimate the level of computation done by various organic brains. Moravec goes into this to some extent in his book. At best, one might say what sort of computer power it would take to simulate the neural workings of a spider, or other creature. There is some debate over the computational power required to simulate the human brain. However, even if the organic brain equivalent figures are off by a factor of 1000, that only delays the issue for 10 years (given the accelerating rate of increase...). If the estimate is off by 1,000,000 times, this just delays things to 2040.
In my opinion, Kurweil's analysis of the evolutionary dynamics of a world wide web of downloaded humans is flawed because it ignores fundamental aspects of ecology and evolution. Specifically, here are two issues about his conclusion:
a) it assumes humans in a different environment will still act human with classical human motivations (as opposed to dissolve into an unrecognizable set of bits or simply locking in a pleasure loop) because to a large extent environment elicits behavior, and
b) it ignores evolution and its implications in the digital realm (especially the enhanced pace of evolution in such a network and the implications for survival).
Of these, the most important is (b).
Evolution is a powerful process. Humans have evolved to fit a niche in the world -- given a certain environment which includes a 3D reality and various other organisms (including humans). Humans have an immune systems (both mental and physical) capable of dealing with common intellectual and organismal pathogenic threats in their environment. There is no easy way to translate this to success in a digital environment, because the digital environment will imply different rewards and punishments for various behavior, and evolve predators and parasites which these immune systems have never been exposed to before. Human style intelligence is valuable in a human context for many reasons -- but sophisticated intelligence is not necessarily a key survival feature in other niches (say, smaller ones the size of roaches, hydra or bacteria). In short, the human way of thinking will be inadequate for survival in the digital realm. Even augmented minds that are connected to the network will face these threats and likely be unable to survive them. Kurzweil discusses the importance of anti-viral precautions in his book, but I think he is rosily optimistic about this particular aspect.
At best, one might in the short term construct digital environments for digital humans to live in, and defend these environments. However, both digitized human minds and immensely larger digitized human worlds will be huge compared to the smallest amount of code that can be self replicating. These digital "bacteria" will consume these digital human minds and worlds because the human minds and worlds will be constructed, not evolved. Human minds will be at a competitive disadvantage with smaller, quicker replicating code. Nor will there be any likelihood of a meaningful merger of human mind with these evolved and continually evolving patterns.
I could endlessly elaborate on this theme, but in short -- I find it highly unlikely that any mind designed to work well in meatspace will be optimal for cyberspace. It will be overwhelmed and quickly passed by in an evolutionary sense (and consumed for space and runtime). It is likely this will happen within years of digitization (but possibly minutes or hours or seconds). As an example experiment, create large programs (>10K) in Ray's Tierra and see how long they last! http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/tier ra/tierra.html
Our best human attempts at designing digital carriers (even using evolutionary algorithms) will fail because of the inherent uncompetetiveness of clunky meatspace brain designs optimized for one environment and finding themselves in the digital realm. For a rough analog, consider how there is an upper limit of size to active creatures in 3D meatspace for a certain ecology. While something might survive somehow derived from pieces of a digitized person, it will not resemble that person to any significant degree. This network will be an alien environment and the creatures that live in it will be an alien life form. One might be able to negotiate with some of them at some point in their evolution citing the commonality of evolved intelligence as a bond -- but humanity may have ceased to exist by then.
In short, I agree with the exponential theme in Kurzweil's book and the growth of a smart network. We differ as to the implication of this. I think people (augmented or not) will be unable to survive in that digital world he predicts for any significant time period. Further, digital creatures inhabiting this network may be at odds or indifferent to human survival, yet human civilization will likely develop in such a way that it is dependent on this network. The best one can hope for in the digital realm is "mind children" with little or no connection to the parents -- but the link will be as tenuous as a person's relation to a well cultivated strain of Brewer's yeast, since the most competetive early digital organisms will be tiny.
Once you start working from that premise -- the impossibility of people surviving in the digital world of 2050, then Kurweil's book becomes a call to action, just like Bill Joy's comments. I don't think it is possible to stop this process for all the reasons both people mention. It is my goal to create a technological alternative to this failure scenario. That alternative is macroscopic self-replicating (space) habitats. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak However, they are no panacea. Occupants of such habitats will have to continually fight the self-replicating and self-extending network jungle for materials, space, and power. (Sounds like the making of a sci-fi thriller...) And they may well fail against the overwhelming odds of an expanding digital network without conscience or morality. Just look at Saberhagen's Beserker series http://www.berserker.com/ or the Terminator movies.
It will be difficult for Kurweil to change his opinion on this because he have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. He was making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in his book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt.
This chart suggests that will happen around 2020 for AIs costing $1000:
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~ hpm/book98/fig.ch3/p060.html
so it will probably happen about 2015 for AIs costing 100X as much.
Hopefully laws and taxation could address the problem you raise for a while. But I agree, this is something to be very concerned about.
You are correct of course; systems designed to act must have something (like behavioral rules) causing the actions.
The issue is evolution. Even if you design a system to do one thing, if it has the capacity to evolve (or even learn), then the behavior may eventually change to be other than what the original designers intended -- to be instead behavior shaped by various evolutionary pressures. Consider the situation you describe of "it's going to be destroyed if it hurts anyone". Assume this principle is applied to millions of systems or varying designs which can learn. Some of these systems hurt people and are destroyed, and some of them don't hurt people and are duplicated. In this situation, systems might evolve that (A) reliably don't hurt anyone, (B) reliably hurt people without it being obvious, or (C) just once subvert or destroy the enforcer of that situation, and then continue to evolve in various directions.
This is the problem with Asimov's "three laws of robotics". In fact, in one of his stories (I forget which), he points it out at the end when basically two of the robots (while switched off!) decide they are superior or "more human" than the organic humans for various reasons. So even though they are still bound by the three laws in this case, the definition of "human" has changed -- to the robot's advantage. The implications of this are not worked out though.
For example, consider the bubble designs by Michael Savage, consisting of a large air filled bubble, a layer of plastic, six feet of water (for cosmic ray shielding) and another layer of plastic (gold coated to control glare).
http://www.luf.org/bin/vie w/GIG/GalacticInformationGuide
http://www.luf.org/
Or consider the huge O'Neill habitats.
http://www.ssi.org/space_art.html
Sometimes, you just need to so something on a big enough scale.
http://www.imax.com/films/distributi on/L5.html
NASA needs to get over its fascination on building tin can space ships to go to planets (and tin can space stations to support that). It needs to start researching and doing civil engineering in space -- making new land and cities in space.
http://www.spaceandrobotics.org/debate.h tm
At least some people at NASA get it:
http://near.jhuapl.edu/
John Lewis (the author) is one of the heros of the space settlement revolution. A more technical book by him is "Physics and Chemistry of the Solar System": http://www.astro.umd.edu/ ~mcfadden/books/Lewisreview.html
He is involved somehow with Spacewatch (a program at the University of Arizona, led by Dr. Tom Gehrels) which has done much of the pioneering work in the field of NEO detection. http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/asterimp.h tml
Another good site is: http://www.permanent.com/ where Mark Prado also has a book on this topic.
Why did no women make it onto the voting list?
Cynthia put four person-years of work into this product (unpaid), which is released under the GPL. A year of that time was spent in a dark apartment in Des Moines, Iowa translating convoluted USDA soil science modeling equations from spaghetti Fortran to C++ and then Delphi. She then wrote an incredible help system and documentation, which serves as a major GPL'd reference work on soil science and agricultural modelling. Her persistance in finishing the project in the face of discouragement and isolation was awesome.
Because this software is in Delphi and is an end-user application, it hasn't really attracted much attention by the Open Source community. It has however been downloaded by thousands of people around the globe to learn more about how to grow food sustainably. Hopefully, if Borland/Inprise releases Delphi for Linux as planned, this software might become an important Linux application.
(Disclaimer: This award nomination is a bit self-serving since I put two person-years in on that project too, and Cynthia is my wife.)