Is technology immortal?

"But the deeper lesson of this whole exercise is that — to a degree I didn't appreciate until Kevin forced me to look — technology does indeed persist. Tools, machines, they change, they adapt, they morph, but they continue to be made. I hadn't noticed this tenaciousness before."

Tools Never Die, The Finale

Dark Matter: New Evidence on How Galaxies Are Born

Time magazine article on a new paper published in Nature that explains starburst galaxies as resulting from the size of the dark matter that surrounds them.

Dark Matter: New Evidence on How Galaxies Are Born

Modified theory of gravity or dark matter?

There was a time when the idea of dark matter pervading the universe was considered by most cosmologists as a radical theory not to be taken very seriously. However, over time ever more evidence from observations of galaxies, and galaxy clusters and the afterglow of the big bang pointed to the existence of dark matter.

Despite the adoption of dark matter as the best current explanation for observations, some researchers prefer an idea known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) which is basically a theory that gravity works a little differently than currently understood on larger scales.

In this paper, Stacy McGaugh, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, College Park, reports that MOND can explain an observed correlation between the mass and the rotation speed of galaxies. McGaugh gathered data from various sources on 47 galaxies that contain more hydrogen gas than stars. The mass of the gas can then be estimated directly. McGaugh made a plot of visible mass versus rotation speed for the galaxies. He then plotted the prediction that comes straight out of MOND in a few lines of algebra. The MOND line went right through the data. "You draw the line and the data fall right on it," McGaugh says. "No muss, no fuss." He reports the result in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters.

Does this mean gravity may work differently on large scales, and that observations of large scale structures in the universe may be explained without invoking dark matter? Most astronomers would still say the evidence for dark matter is too strong for the theory to be discarded, but some believe the jury is still out on the dark matter verdict.

More Evidence Against Dark Matter?

The Physical Limits of Inference

Abstract

I show that physical devices that perform observation, prediction, or recollection share an underlying mathematical structure. I call devices with that structure "inference devices". I present a set of existence and impossibility results concerning inference devices. These results hold independent of the precise physical laws governing our universe. In a limited sense, the impossibility results establish that Laplace was wrong to claim that even in a classical, non-chaotic universe the future can be unerringly predicted, given sufficient knowledge of the present. Alternatively, these impossibility results can be viewed as a non-quantum mechanical "uncertainty principle". Next I explore the close connections between the mathematics of inference devices and of Turing Machines. In particular, the impossibility results for inference devices are similar to the Halting theorem for TM's. Furthermore, one can define an analog of Universal TM's (UTM's) for inference devices. I call those analogs "strong inference devices". I use strong inference devices to define the "inference complexity" of an inference task, which is the analog of the Kolmogorov complexity of computing a string. However no universe can contain more than one strong inference device. So whereas the Kolmogorov complexity of a string is arbitrary up to specification of the UTM, there is no such arbitrariness in the inference complexity of an inference task. I end by discussing the philosophical implications of these results, e.g., for whether the universe "is" a computer.

This paper by David Wolpert was cited in the Scientific American article in the immediately preceding post.

What are the laws of physics anyway?

Physics might be defined as the subject that tries to figure out why the world may look incomprehensibly complex at first, but on closer examination is governed by simple laws. Those laws, applied repeatedly, build up the complexity. From this definition, you'd presume that physicists have at least sorted out what they mean by "law".

What are the laws of physics anyway?

Nanofuture 2030 on the path to Brain Augmentation

The Path to Brain Augmentation

New York Times excerpt from Michael Chorost's book World Wide Mind

Excerpt from chapter 4 of World Wide Mind, which discusses the possibility of using nanotechnology to directly connect the brain to the Internet (and other minds) in coming decades. Chorost discusses the need for any such technology to retain human intimacy. For the technology to be accepted, and successful, it must tactile and face to face interactions.

World Wide Mind

Ray Kurzweil on the significance of IBM's Watson

Ray Kurzweil discusses the significance of IBM's Jeopardy! Champion computer Watson as a milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence.

Kurzweil concludes his thoughts with the statement that: " By the time the controversy dies down and it becomes unambiguous that nonbiological intelligence is equal to biological human intelligence, the AIs will already be thousands of times smarter than us."

While it is likely that artificial intelligence will continue to meet or surpass human intelligence in more and more areas, I'm not sure what it would really mean to think of something "thousands of times more intelligent" than a human. Certainly, computers will ultimately be able to process many times faster than a human brain, but that does not necessarily lead to a correspondingly greater intelligence.

If there are only so many layers of understanding before an ultimate knowledge of the universe would be reached, perhaps there is limit, beyond which it would not be meaningful to discuss greater intelligence. While there is no doubt that human intelligence would not be the pinnacle of potential intelligence in the universe, I'm not sure it will come to pass that computers will be thousands of times more intelligent than people in any meaningful sense.

The significance of IBM's Watson

The Atlantic: Mind vs Machine

IN THE RACE TO BUILD COMPUTERS THAT CAN THINK LIKE HUMANS, THE PROVING GROUND IS THE TURING TEST—AN ANNUAL BATTLE BETWEEN THE WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE PROGRAMS AND ORDINARY PEOPLE. THE OBJECTIVE? TO FIND OUT WHETHER A COMPUTER CAN ACT “MORE HUMAN” THAN A PERSON. IN HIS OWN QUEST TO BEAT THE MACHINES, THE AUTHOR DISCOVERS THAT THE MARCH OF TECHNOLOGY ISN’T JUST CHANGING HOW WE LIVE, IT’S RAISING NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.

Mind vs. Machine

Brief summary of Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument

Bostrom's Simulation argument briefly summarized in this 2006 New Scientist article.

here is the argument as originally presented in Philosophical Quarterly

Watch NOVA's program on Watson: "The Smartest Machine on Earth

NOVA's program on the development of Watson, the Jeopardy computer champion.

The Smartest Machine on Earth

See also the IBM Watson page

Watson crushes the human competition on Jeopardy

Watson wins big

Brian Greene: The Hidden Reality: interview and excerpt from his new book

Brian Greene's new book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, explores how the cutting edge theories of physics including string theory, inflation, and quantum mechanics suggests that our universe may be one of many.

NPR recently had a story on Greene's new book that included an excerpt of the first chapter. Here is the link.

The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Greene about his new book. Link to WSJ article.

Watson and the future of AI

The fact that there are now computers who can compete and win on Jeopardy is remarkable. Of course computers can easily store the database of knowledge necessary for a successful performance, but understanding language and being able to anticipate the question and respond fast enough to beat quality human opponents is amazing and points to the slow but steady progress being made in the field of artificial intelligence.

Watson and the future of AI

Time Magazine on the Singularity- 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

Time magazine furthers the popularization of the concept of the Singularity

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal