Recently, Grinding.be posted a response to a Daily Galaxy’s longevity articles’ counterpoint by Bioethicist Leon Kass, and the cultural barriers he’s creating to longevity.

A quote that guts me is “the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual.” I’ve heard these words before from my mother of all people, who is smart but has no social agenda such as Kass and his ilk. I’d love to live to a thousand to see what humans become and how they change. I am overwelmed with what humans have done in our past and wonder what we’re going to be like. My mother doesn’t share that interest - she wants to die happy, healthy and secure. A “good, long run” as they call it today. Granted, the medical discoveries in 20 years may not be enough to trans-humanize her, but she’s dying on the cusp.

The major problem with Kass’ words is “blessing for every human individual.” I’m fairly certain that many boys dying from bullet wounds, parentless in Sierra Leone do not share that belief. Whereas, ironically, the suicidal religious people we’re encountering throughout the world feel extremely blessed.

Setting the blessing aside, I have to ask - “what is Kass’ goal?” Kass and people like Kass have some sort of entrenched meme that locks them into thinking breeding-is-good and redemptive-death-is-good. But living intellectually free is bad. Kass’ is creating a cultural barrier, or perhaps simply participating in a cultural barrier, that restricts change. Through capitalism, such barriers cause high risk-vs-reward mechanisms, but in this case, I believe the rewards is much more than money and resources.

Kass’ approach is an inhibitor of wide-spread use of life-extension, and those who have the resources to circumvent the obstacles Kass and ilk propose will cause a have/havenot split.

Now, you can almost argue that there’s the root of human races in our current world: homo sapiens capitalis (Western people with long lives and surmounting technology and culture) and homo sapiens restrictis (a population restricted to geography by infrastructure and warfare).

Right now, it doesn’t take much to cross over - in fact, those who reason/strive/risk it out, leave their community to societies more tolerant and stable. Those left behind without the resources are stuck in worn-torn areas (Congo, Sudan, Sierra Leone). But even that risk adds Darwinistic competition to the human race.

If homo sapiens capitalis develops a technology that creates such life extension, and Kass-ites can prevent just enough access, the race will split.

And compete for resources.

That’s a little foreboding. However, the alternative is that if individuals were allowed to choose their evolutionary paths, if they could decide which of their genetic and memetic views would procreate. What’s strange, if you think about it, is that Kass is choosing. It’s just he’s fighting to prevent our right to choose as well.

Johnathan Hickman has written a very important work - and yes, it’s a comic book, named Transhuman. He addresses most of the important concepts of posthuman intelligence in today’s capitalistic world. Who is going to get there first? How are they going to get there? And what rules are they willing to break?

In a fun homage to the Dot-com boom, Hickman basically introduces the average non-signularity tracking reader to the concepts of transhumanism. But more importantly, the funding of becoming Transhuman. And he doesn’t treat it lightly. In the post-Watchmen world of superheros, the powers aren’t important as the story around them, and the characters.

Transhumanists are already “outside the norm” as we stand today. We’re having to change our name, and while we attend TED conferences, we really aren’t accepted by the mainstream. Hickman does a great job bringing these types of characters to life, and those who wish to take advantage of them.

Some Singularity searchers will complain that it’s not realistic (cough), that once a Transhuman event occurs, our souls (cough) will transcend or some other bullshit, but they’re the people who are jumping on the bandwagon without looking deeply enough or reading hard enough.

And then there’s Hickman’s take on non-Human intelligence, which I must say really sticks it to you. Read it and find out. Available at all COOL comic book stores around.

Let Oscar Pistorius run. And ignore DVICE.com’s opinion on him.

Before we begin today, it’s important to get across a couple of issues - 1) I don’t know Peter Pachal, he’s probably a nice guy, 2) anything I say is likely to go into the bitbucket, or at worst, generate traffic for both DVICE.com and heresy.com. I’m under no delusions here - my site is fucking small beans. So, there’s no real downside for me posting this.

On the other hand, Pachal’s announcement that SHIFT: Why the Olympics should say no to cyborgs like Oscar Pistorius is a sad, sad case of anti-transhumanism nonsense and fear of the future. Pistorius, for those that don’t know, is a double leg amputee that runs fast with his cool cheetah legsprings.

Watch him run.

So, here’s the basic facts that people argue:
- Oscar may have an advantage because the springs could give him an advantage. Up to 25% less energy expenditure - I’m… leary of that very convenient number. (See NYTimes article)
- Oscar isn’t a threat yet (the Slate article covers this nicely)

And then Pachal writes “Let’s create the cyberolympics” which is the “separate but equal” view of transhumanism and human-plus. I read the poetry and hear the announcers, everyone is in awe of the body conditions of Olympic athletes, but when they speak, they speak of the soul, the Olympic heart and dedication required to be in those competitions.

If anything, the Paralympics should be folded directly into the Olympics to celebrate all of these athletes’ souls, because there will be a time that being human is a choice, and being something other than human will be the norm. And until there’s enough people with cheetah springs to run their own heats, at least let people the possibility human spirit now. Give him and every consciousness an opportunity for a gold medal, just like the whole bodied humans.

This isn’t a handicap run where we feel sorry for the cripple, or fight against engineering over the human spirit. Dedicating one’s life to run fast, or play ball, or wrestle is a dedication of a lifetime. We normals envy their physiques, but yearn for the Olympic spirit.

If “Tech is our Obsession” is the slogan for DVICE.com, it shouldn’t be making luddite proclamations but championing their cause, and the same goes for Mr. Pachal. I realize he intended something LIKE this, but let’s tear the barriers down, not move them around. I visit DVICE.com (and Engadget, Grinding.be, IO9.com, etc.) so I can see what is possible, not read about the fear of technological change. We get enough fear mongering in our everyday lives.

Until then, reload the video and watch Oscar run. Watch them all run.

(Another decent article about the Olympic committees decision here).

IO9 and Anders Sandberg both have thrown in their hats on why posthumans get the short shaft in Hollywood movies. IO9 basically took the bombastic route, and of course, Anders is far more intelligent about the analysis.

I keep saying that posthumanity is going grow from fashion - we’ve seen the adoption of clear indicators of posthumanity: cochlear impants, bluetooth earbuds, extreme body modifications, and the acceptance of handicap access (such as very large people torturing electric gokarts at shopping malls) in our society. The more people overcome their physical form, the more accepting we’re going to be of true cybernetics.

Movies, on the other hand, have had different take for several reasons, but the easiest is Sandberg’s point that transhumans are transgressions against purity/sanctity. But we’ve had some excellent examples of good stories. Leaving comic heroes gone to movies out of this discussion, the quintessential movies all have transformative stories of the big transhumanist bad guys:

Terminator has the malevolent posthuman intelligence (Skynet, not the terminator) but Terminator 2 has the whole “boy and his terminating pet” theme where the advanced intelligence knows better than the boy, proving that destructive T-800 flesh on top of metal exoskeleton have hearts too.

Any version of Blade Runner works for this as well. Rutger Hauer’s delivery of “tears in rain” all points to how superior humans are both a menace and a boon to sentience at large.

Last but not least, Kurt Rusell as Dexter Riley in the Computer Wore Tennis Shoes transforms from an all-American kid to a super intelligent freak of nature… and back to a kid again. Because we all know that super intelligence isn’t a threat to anyone.

But I digress a bit. I refer to Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown quote - once we get over the initial fear, we’ll realize it’s not so bad being better at what we do.

I applaud the Olympic committee’s decision to allow Oscar Pistorius, a 21-year-old South African double-amputee sprinter, to compete for the Olympics. Slashdot has generously already provided all the pros and cons - documenting all the fears and expectations that will come of this decision of allowing Pistorius to compete.

Our bodies are not the end of our existence - they are the beginning and while we’ve received the fortunate benefits of evolutionary drive - Pistorius is an example of how and in what way we’re going to change ourselves - engineer ourselves - to become more of what we want to be.

Cries of unfair treatment exist on both sides of this call - one side says he’s a runner and should be allowed to compete, the other point out he’s not completely human. It’s a phenomenon of introducing change into the status quo.

Pistorius’ appendages are no different when you see obese or old people on electric go-carts, or when others perform wheelchair races. We must move forward, and moving forward requires people like Pistorius to not accept his body as a limitation, Olympic members to make decisions like the one above, and for all of us people to accept those who either by accident or design set themselves so far apart.

We are phenomenal minds and we should be allowed to live phenomenal ways.

So, after my last post, I’ve been sick, sick and tired, tired, and pissed off. In short, desperately looking for a job so much so that I’m willing to talk to recruiters. I am completely out of the swing of new job hunting.

My writing is suffering too. Paragraphs rather than pages. It’s not writers’ block, it’s basic exhaustion and prioritization. I’ve triple booked my social calendar. Candle’s burning at both ends, the middle and I’m thinking about throwing the whole damn ball of wax into the microwave.

The Ego
So I keep circling around the idea of the Engine of Prediction’s thesis: that intelligence drives it’s own existence, and we’re lucky and unlucky that we’re the biggest perpetrators of intelligence. I’m reading books from Dennett, Hamer, and Hawkins. The issue is that when I read their books, I feel incredibly dwarfed by their accomplishments.

Combine that with the job/career, and it makes for a pretty sucky week.

Work it through
So, I’m struggling with what I see as “inevitability.” True academia would talk about possibilities, potential events that MAY happen. That’s shit. There are certain parts of cultural structures that make things inevitable: the drive to survive - either for an organism or a cultural artifact (aka “religion”, “brand”, “corporation”) - that cause an unethical Machiavellian calculus justifying immoral actions of the participant(s).

This equation causes poor choices: we either think we have no choice, or that our sacrificial choice will cause a remarkable long shot, a soulful gamble, where we believe that if we throw ourselves on our swords, the world will change with our selfless acts.

What crap. The so-called selfless act is in itself a meme - one that governs our behavior. We perform the act, such as working late at the expense of our personal lives, - or pursuing a loved one who spurns us at the expense of our [emotional wellbeing] - suffering in pursuit of a higher cause: honor or truth or love. Our payoff is an emotional stroke that says “You did your best” - like denial, our grief over a situation.

Hamer’s work discusses the God Gene as a biomechanical device that gives us optimism. I wonder if there’s a martyrdom gene that governs our behavior. There’s definitely a martyrdom meme, we wouldn’t have messiahs without it - but a martyrdom gene where a single unit sacrifices his or her wellbeing for the good of the culture (not the group - the culture).

Oh Unholee Orgasmatronics
Warren Ellis swings his large media johnson again: Porno for Terrorist Pilots. So our city’s concrete is flesh that needs to be rendered by explosions… or something. Totally not safe for work, but the logic of feminine sexuality being destroyed by terrorist planes.

I’m strangely reminded of Laurie Anderson’s Mach 20, which has Japanese sperm whales inseminating the California coastline at a high rate of speed.

It’s a psychological event of some sort - our brains are being inseminated by another culture, one hostile to sexual imagery that they must destroy it. I find myself oddly eroticized by the video.

Pages since last post: 1… ok, 6 paragraphs. grumble

For a while now, I’ve been following the talks over at Ted.com. I honestly don’t care why Teddites are doing what they are doing, but they are doing COOL things. Their talks are a little more and a little less than cutting edge - and they are wise, innovative, and probably some of the best efforts to mass communicate excellent achievements that occur in today’s society.

Ted has shocked me, like with the computer interface or raw data analysis demos, and it’s humbled me, especially when listening to the successes in Africa, their long climb from destruction. The most salient has been Jeff Hawkins Discussion about a Real Brain Theory. Hawkins is the genius behind handheld computing, in my opinion, and while he’s always going to known for that, unless his Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience is able to achieve what he expects to achieve.

If it does, we’ll be in a wonderfully new wide world that will make life much better.

Alan Turing, once he applied some thought to it, basically made an implied behavior - effectively, if we can’t detect a difference between real intelligence and artificial or mechanical intelligence, then there’s no difference. This is a cheap shot, but a valuable cheap shot - if you can’t tell the difference between synthetic and real diamonds, then they are the same thing.

So that’s the goal, but what are the objectives? What’s the steps to achieve the goal? Hawkins has a plan - it’s of course, not the only plan, but he’s been the only one I’ve heard on in the last 4 years to bring something new in my opinion. Maybe I haven’t been reading the right literature, but it was great to stumble across this Ted Talk by Jeff Hawkins.

If you think about it, without computers, we never had a physical representation for Intelligence. Animals are obviously not as intelligent as us. Tractors, factories, mountains, weather, river… none of these things are something that compare to intelligence as we know it. We’ve had no models - until some guy got a railroad spike driven through his head and suddenly behavior & brains was inextricably linked. Since then, we’ve learned a hell of a lot more. The closest thing that comes to my mind is a book - but books “remember”, but the don’t think.

However, in fiction - and the odd religious text, books predict a future, or a “possible future” - except for escapist fiction (fantasy).

Computers, from games to spreadsheets, are prediction engines. Right now they are crude core functionality of input-output. This brings me back to Jeff Hawkins. Our brains are not computers with memory, or books, but prediction engines. We create the reality by embracing, learning, modeling and predicting - over time, our predictions become more accurate. We change our economy, fashion and lifestyle through predictions - from educated guesses to inventions.

More importantly, it doesn’t appear to be all that hard to understand after seeing some examples.

Last year, I searched for “mashup” on google and got zip. Now you search and you get tons. Gotta love that. Recently stumbled onto DJ Earworm and I’ve got to admit, we’re at a brand new stage of artistic development.

I’ve long believed that we will develop a new level of language once we can communicate using emotions. First we used crude hand signals, body language and grunts - the rudiments which has gone from cuneiform and kanji and evolved into txtmsgs and L33tsP34K. Thirty+ years ago, we starting samples and scratching. Earlier, I pointed out about WiiJaying.

Sound, especially popular music, convey an emotional role, almost engram of emotion that when you hear the music, the emotions come with it. Mashups allow those emotions to overdub on each other, weaving a complex structure.

First we had a songwriter who took an original folk tune and made a new song of it. For instance how Hank Williams music pulls from early tavern & bluegrass music.

Then we had remakes of those songs. All through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it was incredibly popular to make entire albums with no original songs.

Then we had an incredible rise of original music - very rarely now we have remakes, but soon people began to sample other works, evoking the original emotions.

Now we’re to the point where full musical structure are woven full cloth of other emotional impacts - so emotionally, there’s an entire landscape of musical combinations.

Now, if we could only learn to communicate in these complex glyphs to convey complex emotional information without having spend time to remix them all. For example, I come home from work late one night and the wife glyphs at me that “she’s angry, why I didn’t call, and she had her heart set on our anniversary tonite being special” and I glyph back that “two employees are in the hospital, the car has a flat and I’m sorry” all at once.

One of the necessary steps of communication is the ability to get the “other” to empathize with you, and more importantly make it seem you’re empathizing with them - removing the “other” in the communication. If we were able to just give our emotions to others and receive - without the definitions of “otherness” (male-female, black-white, my body space-your body space, etc), we could immediately know where the other stands and recognize a common path.

DJ Earworm’s mashups take this to a truly new masterful level, overlaying all of the emotions to make some increble stuff - I highly recommend his “What’s my Name?” and “Stairway to Bootleg Heaven”.

Other sites, please recommend yours -

Smashup Derby’s Smells Like Billy Jean (watch out, more than slightly adult content here) Please note that the crowd loves to sing along on these, indicating that the emotion is common to all of the people in the audience. What is it about Smells like a Teen Spirit and White Stripes?

Strangely, I’m reminded of Simon and Garfunkel’s cover of Scarborough Fair with Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme with the 6 o’clock news.

Took the rest of us long enough to catch up, hell, that’s 40 years old now.

The singularity is a point of constantly increasing change (some say infinite). Some here have posted both doomsday and utopia scenarios.

I theorize that the observers of the singularity has a set of rules.

1) The exact point of time of the singularity cannot be observed.

Because we truly can’t define what the singularity is accurately (how does one define infinite change), the observer - no matter how well informed - will not know the event when it occurs.

2) The results of the singularity is unknowable.

The only constant of the singularity is change. Saying it’s doomsday (borgification) or utopia (rapture of the nerds), is only a hypothesis, and with infinite change, it could go from one to the next rapidly.

3) If the observer doesn’t know when an event will occur or the results of the event, then the only observation which can be made is to measure all change.

If something is unobservable, and it’s effects unknown, there is no mechanism other than the rate of change (delta from one minute to the other), but you’d have to measure the rate of change of everything. Which is, of course, near impossible.

Because the observer only observes from their locus (as a point in time able to see a finite amount of space), if the rate of change is high: they will always see the singularity as something in the future. A true “event horizon” where measurements of deltas are “colored” by the amount of space at the unique time.

Unless the observer can observe from multiple loci (multiple points of time and space) only then will they be able to see that the singularity occured (in the past). Right now, it’s a physical impossibility to capture such a measurement, other than an approximation.

But tomorrow, it may be possible due to the fact that infinite change can cause an observer to be a two loci at one time, or measure everything accurately.

Posted here first, then on KurzweilAI.net
Copyright 2006 Bob Kelly

Charles Stross’s award winning Accelerando is worth it just to get to page 338 for the line:

The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they’re really not resurrectees - they’re simulations based on their original’s recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as they’re herded into the wood-chipper future.

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In Stross’s future singularity event, the sins of the present - the effluvia of our societies’ politics, laws, politeness and evil we perpetrate on each other - are the jailcells we built for ourselves. In today’s literature of transhumanism and singularity, The Rapture of the Nerds is envisioned as either utopic and dystopic. Stross tackles that duality and creates a believable construct to weave his multi-generational story on.

I measure the success of books by the amount of times I’ve given them away. I don’t believe in lending things - if something is good enough to posess, to have and to hold, the best thing to do is to give it to someone you care for - or give it to someone who has the potential to enjoy it. I’ve given away Snowcrash, Crytonomicon, Lord of the Rings, Amber series, Brust’s Jhereg series books many times. I look forward to giving away Accelerando and other Stross’ stories to friends and enemies alike.

You can download Accelerando for free here. I would encourage you to buy it only because it’s $7.99 (aka “cheap”) and giving your money to an author and publisher is better than 2 cups of Starbucks. It’s not an easy read - as a singularity is the point where tractable changes occur so fast the rate of change is inifinite - the background of the story is constantly changing. That fact alone had me re-reading sections for the fun of it keeping the point of change in my mind.

At the same time - the first (of two three scenes - feh, with the number of children, you’d think these characters would have more fun propigating) - was one that really blew my mind, only for the reference of insect mating.

Other books that inspire me along these lines are: Joe Haldeman’s Forever War and Walter Williams’ Aristos. Please add to the comments those you recommend as well.