Scientists studying sunspots for the past two decades have concluded that the magnetic field that triggers their formation has been steadily declining. If the current trend continues, by 2016 the sun's face may become spotless and remain that way for decades—a phenomenon that in the 17th century coincided with a prolonged period of cooling on Earth.

The last solar minimum should have ended last year, but something unexpected has been happening. Although solar minimums normally last about 16 months, the current one has stretched over 26 months—the longest in a century. A reason, according to one source may be that the magnetic field strength of sunspots appears to be waning.

Tracking and predicting solar minimums and maximums is growing in importance given the potential for devastating solar flares.

Researchers have successfully used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to treat rodents afflicted with Parkinson's Disease (PD). The research, conducted at the Buck Institute for Age Research, validates a scalable protocol that the same group had previously developed. It may eventually be used to manufacture the type of neurons needed to treat the disease and paves the way for the use of iPSC's in various biomedical applications.

Researchers in the lab used human iPSCs that were derived from skin and blood cells and coaxed them to become dopamine-producing neurons. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the mid-brain that facilitates many critical functions, including motor skills. Patients with PD lack sufficient dopamine; the disease is a progressive, incurable neurodegenerative disorder that affects 1.5 million Americans and results in tremor, slowness of movement and rigidity.

"The studies are very encouraging for potential cell therapies for Parkinson's disease," said Alan Trounson, Ph.D., the President of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "The researchers showed they could produce quantities of dopaminergic neurons necessary to improve the behavior of a rodent model of PD. We look forward to further work that could bring closer a new treatment for such a debilitating disease."

Source.

It's funny cuz it's true; I think we all know people who would "fail" the Turing test 😉

Click image to enlarge.

Tony Beavers brings this fascinating paper to our attention, "Moral Machines and the Threat of Ethical Nihilism." Excerpt from the paper:

In 2000, Allen, Varner and Zinser addressed the possibility of a Moral Turing Test (MTT) to judge the success of an automated moral agent (AMA), a theme that is repeated in Wallach and Allen (2009). While the authors are careful to note that a language-only test based on moral justifications, or reasons, would be inadequate, they consider a test based on moral behavior. “One way to shift the focus from reasons to actions,” they write, “might be to restrict the information available to the human judge in some way. Suppose the human judge in the MTT is provided with descriptions of actual, morally significant actions of a human and an AMA, purged of all references that would identify the agents. If the judge correctly identifies the machine at a level above chance, then the machine has failed the test” (206). While they are careful to note that indistinguishability between human and automated agents might set the bar for passing the test too low, such a test by its very nature decides the morality of an agent on the basis of appearances. Since there seems to be little else we could use to determine the success of an AMA, we may rightfully ask whether, analogous to the term "thinking" in other contexts, the term "moral" is headed for redescription here. Indeed, Wallach and Allen’s survey of the problem space of machine ethics forces the question of whether in fifty years (or less) one will be able to speak of a machine as being moral without expecting to be contradicted. Supposing the answer were yes, why might this invite concern? What is at stake? How might such a redescription of the term "moral" come about?

Link.

Data visualization is becoming increasingly important, so I'm always interested in seeing the various ways in which massive amounts of information can be portrayed in a human-comprehensible style. To that end, IBM's ILOG Elixir development team is working on a powerful and elegant interactive dashboard:

IBM's team is showing off the data rendering capabilities of Adobe Flex through an online demonstration of their World Factbook Dashboard. It's a heavily stylized application that contains various gauges, 3D column and pie charts, a radar chart, a treemap and a world map view, which are all coordinated and synced through some very smooth animated effects. The different views also allow for the dynamic, user-driven scaling of the color legend, while countries can be compared by those in their immediate neighborhood.

More here and here.

In light of the recently concluded Singularity Summit, I'll be debating blogger Greg Fish on Skeptically Speaking Radio this coming August 20. We'll be discussing the Singularity and various pathways towards powerful AI.

This will mark my second appearance on Skeptically Speaking. My first debate with Greg Fish can be found here.

Biologist and skeptic PZ Myers has ripped into Ray Kurzweil for his recent claim that the human brain will be completely modeled by 2020 (Note: Not that it's particularly important, but Kurzweil did say it'll take two decades at the recent Singularity Summit, not one). In a rather sweeping and insulting article titled, "Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain," Myers takes the position that the genome cannot possibly serve as an effective blueprint in our efforts to reverse engineer the human brain.

In regards to he claim that the design of the brain is in the genome, he writes,

Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It's [sic] design is not encoded in the genome: what's in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn't even aware of the magnitude of that problem.

We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven't even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil's clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!

Myers continues:

To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it's the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn't even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.

Okay, while I agree that Kurzweil's timeline is ridiculously optimistic (I'm thinking we'll achieve a modeled human brain sometime between 2075 and 2100), Myers's claim that Kurzweil "knows nothing" about the brain is as incorrect as it is disingenuous. Say what you will about Kurzweil, but the man does his homework. While I wouldn't make the claim that he does seminal work in the neurosciences, I will say that his efforts at describing the brain along computationally functionalist terms is important. The way he has described the brain's redundancy and massively repeating arrays is as fascinating as it is revealing.

Moreover, Myers's claim that the human genome cannot inform our efforts at reverse engineering the brain is equally unfair and ridiculous. While I agree that the genome is not the brain, it undeniably contains the information required to construct a brain from scratch. This is irrefutable and Myers can stamp his feet in protest all he wants. We may be unable to properly read this data as yet, or even execute the exact programming required to set the process in motion, but that doesn't mean the problem is intractable. It's still early days. In addition, we have an existing model, the brain, to constantly juxtapose against the data embedded in our DNA (e.g. cognitive mapping).

Again, it just seems excruciatingly intuitive and obvious to think that our best efforts at emulating an entire brain will be informed to a considerable extent by pre-existing data, namely our own DNA and its millions upon millions of years of evolutionary success.

Oh, and Myers: Let's lose the ad hominem.

Researchers at the University of Washington have devised a method that works at a very small scale to sequence DNA quickly and relatively inexpensively. The process could eventually open the door for more effective individualized medicine. It's hoped that the method will, among other things, provide blueprints of genetic predispositions for specific conditions and diseases such as cancer, diabetes or addiction.

"The hope is that in 10 years people will have all their DNA sequenced, and this will lead to personalized, predictive medicine," said Jens Gundlach, a UW physics professor and lead author of a paper describing the breakthrough.

The technique creates a DNA reader that combines biology and nanotechnology using a nanopore taken from Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A. The nanopore has an opening 1 billionth of a meter in size, just large enough to measure a single strand of DNA as it passes through.

The research team placed the pore in a membrane surrounded by potassium-chloride solution and a small voltage was applied to create an ion current flowing through the nanopore. The current's electrical signature changed depending on the nucleotides traveling through the nanopore. Each of the nucleotides that are the essence of DNA (namely cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine) produced a distinctive signature.

The delay is measured in thousandths of a second, which is long enough to read the electrical signals from the target nucleotides. "We can practically read the DNA sequence from an oscilloscope trace," said Gundlach.

The work was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and its National Human Genome Research Institute as part of a program to create technology to sequence a human genome for $1,000 or less. That program began in 2004, when it cost on the order of $10 million to sequence a human-sized genome. The new research is a major step toward achieving DNA sequencing at a cost of $1,000 or less.

Ultimately, it is hoped that these experiments will outline a novel and fundamentally very simple sequencing technology that can now be expanded into a mechanized process.

Computer scientist and technology critic Jaron Lanier offers his two cents on the silicon valley mindset in his op-ed, "The first church of robotics." Excerpt:

The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.

Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.

It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.

What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity — whether it’s the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science or stem-cell research.

If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?

Link.

IEET executive director James Hughes has posted some of his responses to a journalist’s questions about reproductive rights. Highlights:

Do you really think there will be equal access for this technology? Why wouldn’t it create a caste system of the enhanced and the non-enhanced?

Equal access to any technological enablement is the result of ongoing political struggle. Societies with stronger civil liberties, trade unions and social democratic parties will provide better universal technological access, from sewers to the Net to gene therapy. In other more unequal societies genetic therapies may exacerbate inequality. The difference in outcomes will be determined by the strengthen of democratic movements and parties, however, not by policies governing the access to technologies. Because of the growth of medical tourism banning access to a technology will simply restrict access to the wealthy, and will not stem the emergence of a two-tier society.

Why do you dislike the term “designer babies”?

“Designer babies” impugns the motivations of parents, who are generally trying to ensure the best possible lives for their children. If parents provide food, exercise and education for children to ensure that they are smart and healthy we praise them as responsible. When they try to ensure the same goods for their children with reproductive technology we imply that they have twisted, malign, instrumental values.

Even in the case of reproductive choices which are cosmetic, such as eye or hair color, we do not slander parents for how they dress or groom their children, but we do if they exercise a simple cosmetic choice before birth. We should stop using the term.

Totally agree with J's point about rooting out the 'designer babies' term. It totally trivializes and demeans the pending practice. In its place I've been using the term 'human trait selection.'

More.

We're another step closer to reverse-engineering the human brain: IBM scientists have created the most comprehensive map of a brain’s network. The image above, called "The Mandala of the Mind," portrays the long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain, spanning the cortex, thalamus, and basal ganglia, showing 6,602 long-distance connections between 383 brain regions.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a landmark paper entitled “Network architecture of the long-distance pathways in the macaque brain” (an open-access paper) by Dharmendra S. Modha (IBM Almaden) and Raghavendra Singh (IBM Research-India) with major implications for reverse-engineering the brain and developing a network of cognitive-computing chips.

Dr. Modha writes:

We have successfully uncovered and mapped the most comprehensive long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain, which is essential for understanding the brain’s behavior, complexity, dynamics and computation. We can now gain unprecedented insight into how information travels and is processed across the brain. We have collated a comprehensive, consistent, concise, coherent, and colossal network spanning the entire brain and grounded in anatomical tracing studies that is a stepping stone to both fundamental and applied research in neuroscience and cognitive computing.

Link.

While in Chicago last weekend for Lollapalooza 2010 I was able to do a bit of sightseeing. Among the highlights was the brand new Aqua building designed by Jeanne Gang. A gem among other Chicago stand-outs, the Aqua was named the Emporis 2009 skyscraper of the year.

The building is an 82-story mixed-use residential skyscraper in the Lakeshore East development in downtown Chicago. Its appearance changes significantly according to the viewer's position. To capture views of nearby landmarks for Aqua's residents, its balconies extend outward by as much as 3.7 meters. The result is a building composed of irregularly shaped concrete floor slabs which lend the facade an undulating, sculptural quality. The name 'Aqua' fits the nautical theme of the other buildings in the Lakeshore East development and is derived from the wave-like forms of the balconies.

And you thought your sticky accelerator was bad news: Hackers Wirelessly Crash Car's Computer At Highway Speeds:

A team of university researchers has been able to hack into a car's warning systems via wireless sensors, sending fake tire pressure messages at highway speeds and eventually frying an onboard computer. The dawn of the carhacker approaches.

Link.

A popular notion amongst futurists, technoprogressives and transhumanists alike is the suggestion that we can proactively engineer the kind of future we want to live in. I myself have been seduced by this idea; back during the Betterhumans days our mission was to "connect people to the future so that they can create it." Given the seemingly dystopic and near-apocalyptic trajectory that humanity appears to be heading in, this was and still is a powerfully intuitive and empowering concept.

Trouble is, we're mostly deluded about this.

Now, I don't deny that we should collectively work to build a desirable future that is inherently liveable and where our values have been preserved; my progressivism is unshatterable. What I am concerned about, however, is the degree to which we can actually control our destiny. While I am not an outright technological determinist, I am pretty damn close. As our technologies increase in power and sophistication, and as unanticipated convergent effects emerge from their presence, we will increasingly find ourselves having to deal with the consequences. It is in addressing these technological side-effects that our desired trajectories will be re-routed by pragmatism and survivalism.

In other words, adaptationism will supercede idealized notions of where we can and should develop as an advanced species.

For example, consider the remedial ecology and geoengineering concepts. We have not voluntarily chosen to explore these particular areas of inquiry. These are technologies of adaptationist necessity. Because we have buggered up the planet, and because we may have no other choice, humanity finds itself compelled to pour its time and resources into areas in which we wouldn't have otherwise cared about. Breaking down toxic wastes and removing carbon from the atmosphere was not anything anybody would have desired a century ago; our present is not the future that our ancestors could have anticipated or created.

Technological adaptationism also extends to ramifications in the social and political arenas. The entire back-half of the 20th Century was marred by the Cold War, a biopolar geopolitical arrangement that emerged due the presence of ideologically disparate hegemons in the possession of apocalyptic weapons. We have no reason to believe that a similar arrangement couldn't happen again, especially when considering the potential for ongoing nuclear proliferation and the development of novel apocalyptic-scale technologies such as nanoweapons and robotic armadas. Even worse, given the possibility that a small team (or even a single individual) may eventually be capable of hijacking the entire planet, our civil liberties as we know them may cease to exist altogether in favour of mass surveillance and quasi-totalitarian police states.

Again, this isn't anything that any progressive futurist wants. But these are the unintended consequences of technological advancement. We are slaves to technological adaptationism; to do otherwise would be to risk our very own existence. And in order to avoid our extinction (or something similarly catastrophic), we may be compelled to alter our social structures, values, technological areas of inquiry and even ourselves in order to adapt.

As to whether or not such a future is desirable by today's standards is an open question.

Roger Scruton's new book tackles the question of social progress and whether or not it can actually be achieved. Scruton, a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, transhumanist critic, and the author of over thirty books including Beauty and Death-Devoted Heart, looks back into human history and pieces together a rather grim narrative of how our civilization got to where it is now.

According to Scruton, institutions progress but human beings don't. And at the same time the human capacity for cruelty and violence remains infinite. Ultimately, Scruton's anti-transhumanist argument boils down to, "To be truly happy we must be pessimistic"—an adage that most transhumanists reject outright.

Book description:

Ranging widely ove—r human history and culture, from ancient Greece to the current global economic downturn, Scruton makes a counterintuitive yet persuasive case that optimists and idealists -- with their ignorance about the truths of human nature and human society, and their naive hopes about what can be changed -- have wrought havoc for centuries. Scruton's argument is nuanced, however, and his preference for pessimism is not a dark view of human nature; rather his is a 'hopeful pessimism' which urges that instead of utopian efforts to reform human society or human nature, we focus on the only reform that we can truly master -- the improvement of ourselves through the cultivation of our better instincts.

Written in Scruton's trademark style-- erudite, sweeping in scope across centuries and cultures, and unafraid to offend-- this book is sure to intrigue and provoke readers concerned with the state of Western culture, the nature of human beings, and the question of whether social progress is truly possible.

From Richard King's review:

This dose of pessimism is necessary, not because of the leftist intellectuals whom Scruton endlessly takes to task, but largely because of unchecked capitalism. That, if you like, is the snail in the bottle of this conservative philosopher's engaging treatise: it fails to acknowledge that sometimes crises result from conservative patterns of thinking, and not from those who seek to challenge them.

From Kenan Malik's review:

Scruton appears equally complacent about the contemporary impact of tradition. The liberalisation of social norms in recent decades undermines tradition and defies human nature, he argues. So why, he asks, should the onus be on conservatives to defend the importance of traditional forms of marriage against "innovations" such as gay partnerships?

The answer is the one that would have been given to those who argued against miscegenation or giving women the vote. The unequal treatment of gay people is a moral wrong and no amount of tradition can make it right. It is up to Scruton to defend discrimination, not liberals to have to justify treating all equally.

Scruton insists that he is averse to optimism only in its "unscrupulous" form. The trouble is, what makes an optimist unscrupulous is, in his eyes, a belief in the possibility of "goal-directed politics". He dismisses as a "fallacy" the "belief that we can advance collectively to our goals by adopting a common plan, and by working towards it". Progressive changes, however, rarely happen by chance. History is a narrative of humans rationally and consciously transforming the world. To give up on "goal-directed politics" is to give up possibilities of betterment.

More from Roger "The Gloom Merchant" Scruton:

Such fallacies have led to disastrous results on account of the false hopes that are built on them. Many of these false hopes have fizzled out. But there is truth in the view that hope springs eternal in the human breast, and false hope is no exception. In the world that we are now entering there is a striking new source of false hope, in the “trans-humanism” of people like Ray Kurzweil, Max More and their followers. The transhumanists believe that we will replace ourselves with immortal cyborgs, who will emerge from the discarded shell of humanity like the blessed souls from the grave in some medieval Last Judgement.

The transhumanists don’t worry about Huxley’s Brave New World: they don’t believe that the old-fashioned virtues and emotions lamented by Huxley have much of a future in any case. The important thing, they tell us, is the promise of increasing power, increasing scope, increasing ability to vanquish the long-term enemies of mankind, such as disease, ageing, incapacity and death.

But to whom are they addressing their argument? If it is addressed to you and me, why should we consider it? Why should we be working for a future in which creatures like us won’t exist, and in which human happiness as we know it will no longer be obtainable? And are those things that spilled from Pandora’s box really our enemies – greater enemies, that is, than the false hope that wars with them? We rational beings depend for our fulfilment upon love and friendship. Our happiness is of a piece with our freedom, and cannot be separated from the constraints that make freedom possible – real, concrete freedom, as opposed to the abstract freedom of the utopians. Everything deep in us depends upon our mortal condition, and while we can solve our problems and live in peace with our neighbours we can do so only through compromise and sacrifice. We are not, and cannot be, the kind of posthuman cyborgs that rejoice in eternal life, if life it is. We are led by love, friendship and desire; by tenderness for young life and reverence for old. We live, or ought to live, by the rule of forgiveness, in a world where hurts are acknowledged and faults confessed to. All our reasoning is predicated upon those basic conditions, and one of the most important uses of pessimism is to warn us against destroying them. The soul-less optimism of the transhumanists reminds us that we should be gloomy, since our happiness depends on it.

Link.

Trouble brewing: The FDA is looking to put its paws on the nascent direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing industry. The Association feels that some of the genome services are marketing their products as medical tests, and therefore should provide evidence of their efficacy. Since then, both Congress and the Government Accountability Office have looked into the DTC market, raising the prospects for direct government intervention in the market:

On the most basic level, government intervention in this market has the scent of an invasion of privacy. Shouldn't any citizen have the right to know about the contents of his or her own genome? But it's difficult to separate that basic level of knowledge from the medical implications it has, which is where safety, accuracy, and privacy issues—and government enforcement of them—come in.

Link

This is not transhumanist or futurist art per se, but I thought I'd share it with you here in all its surrealist glory. The influence of such painters as Salvador Dali, Hieronymus Bosch and René Magritte are unmistakeable.

Vladimir Kush's homepage.

"But here's the ugly truth: nature doesn't care about democracy, or who's right, or what's fair. And because of the slow-change aspect of climate, we can't wait until the worst effects are upon us to make a decision -- by then, it would be far, far too late. The scenario we may be faced with is one where doing something for the wrong reasons, run by the wrong people, may still save more lives than holding out for a more appealing option." - Jamais Cascio

Link.

Alexandre Erler, in his essay "Is there any point in worrying about the tedium of immortality?," rightly concludes that we should not regard this supposed threat as having "any serious normative implications for the use and development of life extension technologies." Erler writes,

As for those who might share Walsh’s view and enjoy their life more due to the awareness of their own mortality, they might still preserve that benefit by committing themselves not to use life extension technologies when these become widely available. Of course, when the time to kick the bucket seemed near, they might find themselves unable to respect their previous commitment. But they might perhaps protect themselves from such a hazard by writing advance directives stipulating that life extension procedures should not be made available to them. Or if this were not possible, they could at least publicly declare their resolution not to use such procedures, so as to make it embarrassing for themselves if they failed to meet it. However that may be, the risk that some people might prevent themselves, by their own weakness of the will, to die when they would ideally have wanted to, does not seem a sufficient reason to deprive other people of the benefits of a radically extended lifespan. Pace Temkin, I would conjecture that many of us would welcome greater opportunities to learn everything that we find worth learning, to accomplish more things, and to spend more time with our loved ones. Some have also suggested that future humans might become able to experience goods that we cannot even think of today.

Link.

Thomas McCabe, writing for Kurzweil AI, recently reported on Sir Martin Rees's address to the Long Now Foundation. McCabe notes,

Over the truly long term, our posthuman descendants will become — not just second-generation intelligences — but thousand-generation or million-generation intelligences. He quoted Darwin on how no species can pass its likeness into the distant future unaltered; in a billion years of biological evolution, we’ve gone from bugs to humans, and technological evolution is a lot faster than biological. Our distant descendants will be not just strange, but completely alien to us.

According to Rees, we not only have unprecedented opportunity, but unprecedented responsibility. If the new technologies we build have a high chance of causing civilization-wide catastrophe for the first time in history, we are responsible for actively preventing that from happening, not just trying to predict it or understand it.

Link.