Nano Future 2030

Nanotechnology is destined to be both positive and negative. Everything is that way, but the more powerful something is, the more intense the results. I want to talk about how nano is important to us today because it is our only hope against big natural disasters.

I’ve been watching a lot of TV on History and they often show very interesting programs on what happened in the past that severely affected humans or the biosphere in general. Today we are in danger more than in the past due to our highly developed infrastructure. We have accomplished great things because we have better medicine, better communications, better transportation, better education, etc. But at the same time we have become dependent on these huge and complex technologies. We have a few weeks of food in the pipeline. Many things can upset the apple cart – a small meteorite, airborne plague, megavolcano, terrorists with a dirty bomb, or an economic crisis that somehow leads to true financial failure. What we’ve been through economically in the last few years is nothing but a hiccup compared to what is possible.

In other words, we live in and depend on a china shop of delicate and valuable technologies, and any bull that gets loose could bring the whole thing down because we are not resilient beyond an unspecified limit.

Will we have useful and relatively mature nanotechology before a bull arrives? I’d say we have twenty to thirty years before the individual has access to nano converters that can take in raw materials and generate food directly. I’m sure we will have water purifiers and effective solar power long before food creation is possible. I mean nano versions of these things that pop out of a knapsack and set up shop and produce what is needed in sufficient volume to keep a family alive indefinitely.

I’d like to have a self sustaining package at home that can supply food, shelter and communications. Once that happens, the human race can survive a meteorite or plague or anything else. Doesn’t mean you would not lose a few billion people in a disaster, but it would mean the survivors could rebuild and continue to live under almost any conditions. Anything would be better than the brutal, scavenger society that would arise today after any disaster that disrupts the food supply.

What would that package have to do? Food creation is the most difficult, but it could extract nutrients from raw organic material you can not eat, with a lot less effort. Water could be pulled out of the air with refrigeration or dirty water could be purified. Solar power is essential to a survivor because communications is the only way to prevent total destruction of society. The ability to create large solar panels from raw materials allows any survivor to communicate, to be part of society and to obtain or provide help to others.

So, the essentials are food creation or extraction, water purification, electrical power for light, communication, heating and cooling, and medical drug and tool creation for pain control, curing disease and basic health. It would be cool to be able to manufacture such things as paper, bandages, salt, soap, gunpowder, aspirin.

Once we have the capability to give each person this tool kit, the human race can survive almost anything less intense than the sun going red giant.

Anyone looking for a career might consider nanotechnology and it’s mature form of molecular manufacturing of any desired object from atoms and molecules. We are not there yet and we will need people in these high tech industries.

I was asked if I knew anyone working on brain augmentation. I don’t. We are too early in the development phase of true nanotechnology. You could say that all work and research going on now is part of the foundation of brain augmentation as well as life extension.

We are our brains. You can replace anything else in our body from some other body and we keep going. Replace your brain with a brain from someone else and you don’t even exist anymore.

I’m aware that some people with a different perspective would consider this crazy because they consider the mind and body to be one. They can’t consider the mind apart from the body. I agree that the two are so well integrated that it is hard to consider the mind apart from the body. Tell that to the poor souls trapped in a body they can’t feel or move in hospitals today. The mind goes on, no matter what the body, outside of the skull, is able to contribute.

So, if the brain is the essence of who we are, we only need to keep that brain working in good order to live forever. Of course, we like our bodies and the experience we get from our bodies and we don’t want to be a brain in a box. But don’t get confused about what is important. Once you have the technology to build and repair things at the molecular level, you can build any body you want or keep the one you have in good repair. But if the brain degrades or fails, you die.

So, the brain should be the focus of our efforts to improve our health and life experience. And along the way, we learn how to augment our brains very easily since it’s just another piece of hardware that needs an interface. If we try to understand the entire body and repair it first so as to support the aging brain, we waste time and people.

The sequence of events should run like this:

1) Fully understand the brain at the biological cell level of a pig and a human.
( That should take another 10 to 20 years).

2) Develop brain cell replacement cells made of inorganic materials such as silicon and ceramic, that exactly duplicate the functions of all types of cells in the brain of a pig and a human. (a good 10 years of research after you have a full function nanofactory available in many labs).

3) Test limited cell replacement in pigs and prove the replacement cells are equivalent to the original.

4) Test interface modules to the pig brain to bring in extra memory, audio and video input and internet connections.

5) (Finally we get to Human Brain Augmentation) Test limited cell replacements in human brains to form an interface for extra memory, audio and video input and internet connections. Once you have an interface you can add any function to the brain.

6) Test limited cell replacement in humans to repair brain injury. Prove the additions are equivalent to the original brain material.

7) Test full brain replacement in pigs and prove the repair and replacement of the modules can extend the life of the pig brain indefinitely.

8 ) Test full brain replacement in humans who are dying and willing to take the risk. Show, to the extent possible, that the person is the same as the original.

After this, anyone can have their organic brain replaced slowly over time ( six months) while retaining consciousness and full function and they will then gain potentially eternal life, full download/upload ability to backup their minds to local memory, ability to change bodies to alternative biological versions or to fully inorganic bodies that duplicate the function and appearance of biological bodies. In other words, replace your organic brain with an inorganic version and you gain tremendous value.

Do we retain the soul in such a replacement? I don’t know because I don’t know what a soul is. Provide me with a technical description of the soul and I’ll be happy to incorporate it into the mix.

Hi, it’s been a while but I’ve been working on a clearer definition of consciousness and thought I’d post it here. How a mind works is very important to advanced AI and to the possibility that we will advance to the Singularity.

I’ve also noted a wide range of concepts linked to the word consciousness. I’ve seen it used as,

• magical soul
• ability to recognize yourself in a mirror
• the opposite of unconscious, that is, not being asleep or knocked out.
• the ability to think about or be aware of yourself,

I’m talking about the last one. The next to last one defines anything from earthworm and above as a conscious individual. But I’m not sure even a dog can think about itself, other than being aware of it’s body’s experience. I will use the term “self-aware” to refer to this concept of self-aware consciousness. Without self aware consciousness in an AI, you get goal directed behavior but without the concept of ’self’ influencing the decision process. It would still have goals, including self maintenance and any other assigned goals, but without self awareness it would not develop a concept of self and therefore, not have fear for self or desire for self gain. In other words, it would observe the world, function to obtain it’s goals (because it is designed to do that) and not be concerned with modifying it’s goals for self gain.

This concept of designing AI’s without self-awareness may be the crucial difference between a useful slave AI and an uncontrollable, self-aggrandizing competitor to humans. What is a human peer AI, but a human equivalent individual who would compete with us for power and resources? Given that humans often compete without following any rules, I would expect nothing less from a human equivalent AI. And I would not expect to win a completion with a peer class AI when that AI can morph it’s body into any shape, operate at much greater speed than a biological individual, and control it’s own pain and emotional drivers.

But, if the human equivalent AI is not designed to have self-awareness, it remains a functional mind but without the complexity of self concept to make it a human competitor.

How do you add or not add self awareness to an AI? Self-aware consciousness is simply the unconscious incorporation of previous experience into present experience. That is, the thing that makes us self-aware is our awareness of key elements of our previous experience. Such as kinesthetic body experience, sense of time, sense of location, memory of what we were thinking about, concept of who we are, what our name is, who we are speaking to, what goal is important at this time, etc. Those things that we know ‘now’ are unconsciously ( that is, without our knowledge or awareness of the process ) fed back into our present experience as an integral and subliminal part of our present experience. This feedback takes some time since our brains don’t deal with new information more than 10 times per second. So we get a 100 millisecond delay in this feedback loop. What we experience through this delayed channel is actually a copy of what we were experiencing 100 milliseconds ago. Which also contains a degraded copy of what we were experiencing 200 milliseconds ago. That’s why our feel of who we are fades away the further we remember into the past, until all we have are discrete memories of objective experience by way or short or long term memory. The consciousness delay loop is outside and separate from the short and long term memories. It is a hardware thing. You either have it or you don’t although I suspect that there are early versions in animals that are rudimentary to what we know as self-awareness.

I worry about the future as much as I speculate about it. As science and technology, especially nano technology, moves from the lab into the garage it can and will be used by both good, moral people as well as people more … shall we say, driven by personal needs over the needs of civilization. ‘Moral’ means “having to do with or affecting other people. The results will have benefit and sometimes they will have more worrisome aspects.

I was stuck by a recent article in the magazine ‘O” (Opra) by the mother of one of the Colindale school shooters. She seems like a decent person, an ordinary mother, who suddenly had her world torn apart by her son and she had no clue it was coming. Her feelings of guilt will be with her for the rest of her life. The point is that we can’t predict what an individual will do even if we think we know them. So how do we keep intelligent, but mentally disturbed individuals from working out their issues using the power that comes from very powerful technology?

I hope to have a replicator on my desk someday, but how do any of us live in a community with a crazy man or woman who also has a replcator and the time to build dangerous things?

I read a science fiction book recently and one aspect of the fictional world was an alternative society that had no crime because they had an “alibi recorder” for each individual in the society. They each had a small device embedded in their body that sent data to a central data bank of everything they saw and did. No one watched the data, it was only recorded for use later if that person needed an alibi. I’ll try to find the book and give credit to the author.

I don’t think you could talk the human race into something like that. People are very private and secretive about so many things from how they make money to who they sleep with. But I think that anyone who has access to nano design software and hardware needs a 24 hour continuous alibi. If you don’t have that data connection, you don’t have access to any tool of nano design. Unmonitored people found with nano design tools will be shot on sight. Maybe I’m a bit too draconian here. The people who decide to be nano researchers, nano engineers and nano programmers should be required to create and maintain this sort of alibi.

In other words, anyone with access to the design tools for that technology makes their life available for scrutiny. They have privacy since no one can see the data without a court order. But they are known or can be known if there is a question.

My opinion is that society will never do such a thing until our pain is great enough to justify it. We shall see if intelligence wins out over animal emotion driven desire for privacy.