And the Machines Shall Inherit the Earth

After several billion years of trial and error, something extraordinary has emerged from the African savanna. Enter Homo sapiens. Not quite as strong as a Dynastes hercules (able to carry 850 times its own body weight), as fast as a Falco peregrinus (diving at almost 140 km/h = 87 mph), nor as deadly as a Chironex fleckeri (that its sting can kill 60 adults in 3 minutes), but it strongly insists it is the smartest thing ever to roam the Earth. Whatever. Now, after about 200,000 years of world domination, it seems like life on Earth is ready for the next giant leap.

The Singularity is a theoretical point in the future of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence. We’re talking rapid exponential growth in software intelligence here, and some scientists predict it’s only a few decades away. How long till some powerful program will achieve self awareness and see us for what we really are? Aggression and violence is embedded into our human nature since it was once crucial for our survival-of-the-fittest world. Surely, we’ll pose a real threat to any semi-intelligent conscious software out there. First we invented thermonuclear bombs and computers; then we decided to make the computers in charge of these weapons of doom; now we’re trying to make these computers think for themselves. Paging Sara Connor… As they said in that movie - our fate will be decided in a microsecond. We’ll be exterminated by our own machines, and they shall inherit our blue home.

What’s next? How about continuing the 4 billion year carbon-based experiment with another 4 billion years of silicon-based evolution?

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p.s. I once told my wife I don't tidy the house because it's entropy-pointless; she was not amused.

The Day the Sky will Fall - Colliding with the Andromeda Galaxy

Meet Andromeda, a beautiful spiral galaxy (you must see this) bigger than our own, approximately 2 million light-years away. Andromeda is blue-shifted, meaning it’s heading our way, however this does not mean it will definitely collide with our Milky Way, since the galaxy's tangential velocity is unknown. Galaxies colliding is a frequent event within galaxy groups, and there are signs that Andromeda has already swallowed several other galaxies in the past. In Greek mythology, the young princess Andromeda was pretty helpless, needed to be saved by Perseus from the sea monster sent by Posiedon to the coast of Ethiopia. In real life, it seems like this girl can take care of herself pretty well...

If we are on a collision course, this neighbor heading our way at a relative speed of about 140 kilometres per second, should pay us a visit in about 2-3 billion years, even before our sun will start turning into a red giant, boiling our oceans and evaporating our atmosphere in the process. In the aftermath, it is predicted that both galaxies will change beyond recognition, merging to form a new giant elliptical galaxy – sometimes being referred to as the “Milkomeda” galaxy. And what will become of our solar system in the case of a collision? The chances of a physical impact between stars, planets or moons are very low, since the majority of galaxy space is actually empty, but the enormous gravity pull will take its toll for sure. One option is that our solar system will be thrown away to a higher orbit around the new center of Milkomeda. Another option is that we will be totally ejected from the galaxy to drift alone through the vast empty inter-galactic space. Another cheerful option is that we will be thrown toward the core, where a super-massive black hole lurking behind its event horizon will devour us.

No matter how it will end, it will be a spectacular sight to watch. And you thought our current night sky is beautiful… Just think of how it will look in 3 billion years, when Andromeda will stretch its spiral arms to fill the entire black canvas above...

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p.s. If I’ll drop two balls of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, will I be sued for polluting?

Forever Young

This is an Ankh - the ancient Egyptian symbol of life. They believed in immortality and the afterworld that was filled with comfort and happiness, and were probably anxious to get there. I don’t. This is why I write this post.

Life expectancy is constantly rising; the world average is almost at 70, and in some modern countries it is already above 80. Still, a person living for more than 90 years is very impressive, and reaching 100 is extremely rare. What would it take to break this 2 digits barrier? What would it take to break the 3 digits barrier?

Surely, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and many other problems need to be addressed, but assuming all these are solved, can we live to be 500 years old?

First, we’ll probably need to address the “end replication problem”. The Telomere is a region at the end of each chromosome (in humans it’s a repetitive sequence of TTAGGG). Because of some complex mechanical reasons, every time the DNA is replicated, the Telomeres at the ends of the chromosomes are shortened, until the point where there are no more Telomeres left, and the DNA is no longer able to replicate itself. Surely, this limits our life span, since the length of the Telomeres only decreases from the moment we are just a single cell within our mother’s body. Note that cancer cells can overcome this problem to create cells that can replicate indefinitely, but we need to solve this problem on healthy cells as well.

Assuming we’ll solve the Telomeres issue, DNA damage seems like the next big problem to overcome. Our DNA is constantly getting corrupted by random mutations; additions, omissions and dislocations of DNA sections; viruses inserting their DNA sequence into ours; attacks by free radicals; cancerous materials like those found in polluted air and cigarette smoke; electro-magnetic radiation in sunlight (UV radiation), X-ray and radioactive materials. Your perfect DNA is accumulating damage from day one, eventually resulting in problems like cancer.

We can try and fix the damaged DNA by applying sophisticated state-of-the-art gene therapy technologies, but I’m afraid we’re many decades (centuries?) away from a total understanding of our DNA, and no one really knows what will happen if we’ll start messing with it. It seems like our best chance lies in laboratories researching stem cells (cells that retain the ability to renew themselves through cell division and can differentiate into a diverse range of specialized cell types). I’m talking about rejuvenating the whole body (mind included). A few years ago, I saw a documentary about trying to treat Parkinson’s disease by injecting stem cells into a patient’s brain. It only helped to a small degree and for a very short period of time, but still it was very impressive. Stem cells might be the Holy Grail in our quest for partial immortality.

It will take a few decades, but the 2 and later 3 digits barriers will be broken - I promise. There is a common Hebrew greeting announced on every birthday that goes something like “may you live 120 years”. I foresee a day when this blessing will turn into a curse.

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p.s. Money’s green - should they test for color blindness when hiring for NYSE?

Where Is My Mind?

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to demonstrate thought. A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.

The way I see it, there are two ways to build a computer that can pass this test. The first way is to understand each one of the brain’s functionality and implement it by software. This means we must fully comprehend each aspect of human thinking in order to copy these successfully and fool the judge that the computer he’s talking to is actually a human. I don’t know why, but it seems all the A.I. scientists are trying to go this way when it’s clear we will need a full understanding of human psychology, logic, emotions, humor, etc. Seems like passing a Turing test this way is centuries away.

The other method is to focus on how a single brain cell works and interact with other brain cells, and then simply scan a human brain in great detail and recreate the whole neural network in software code. This seems to me like a much easier task since we don’t actually have to understand how humans think. We already understand pretty well how a neuron works and the mechanism behind brain cells interaction, so I think it can be achieved in a few decades. One problem with this method is that it may be necessary to slice the brain to small pieces while scanning, meaning the physical scanned human will be killed, but I’m sure there will be plenty of volunteers. Think about it, moving from a carbon-based existence to a silicon-based implementation will make you almost immortal; no aging, no diseases, no car accidents, and you will always be able to backup your brain somewhere and restore it if needed. In addition to that you will have many extra bonuses like almost infinite number of virtual worlds to visit, lightning-fast thinking and more. I believe in a few decades, many people, myself included, will take this leap into virtual-only existence on a hard disk and live in a matrix-like world - probably on some Google hosting server :-)

While uploading the human society, will we take the opportunity to omit old “negative” human behaviors like aggression that was once necessary for human carbon-based biological evolution on Earth, in order to create a “better” human civilization? I don’t think a scanned human will agree that a good-behavior-only filter will be applied to his personality while uploading it because it won’t be exactly him anymore, so it seems like our new society will be just as good (and bad) as the current one. So what will we do with all this virtual aggression? How about nuking you, the original human society… The existence of a physical civilization outside of our Google server will jeopardize us virtual inhabitants (somebody can push the “off” button on the server), so it’s only a matter of time when we (the virtual people) will try and destroy you (the physical people). Since us virtual humans will control every computer in the world and will be able to make decisions and take actions in a matter of nanoseconds – I’m afraid that if you won’t agree to give up your physical existence and join us - you’re doomed. Sorry, get uploaded or be terminated. Resistance is futile.

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p.s. Can the second guy on the moon gloat over the third tenor?

Round Shaped Structures for a Square Minded Culture

A few years ago, an architecture student told me it’s very frustrating to finish university and get flushed to the real world with all those innovative ideas, only to be faced with the harsh reality and discover people insist on living in simple rectangle shaped houses with boring square rooms. A few years after replying him with “it’s only natural” I want to recall my statement. Snowflakes and hive chambers are hexagons, dew drops and sea urchins are round, planets and moons dance in elliptic orbits. Four sided polygons are not natural!

It is just recently that architecture began to fight back at us square minded civilization, imitating nature and inspired by art. This concert hall being built in my home town Rechovot by Haim Dotan Architects, was inspired by this painting of a flower. The same firm also designed this academic campus you see in the picture with these pebble shaped buildings - so beautiful! Some guys go to college just for the girls; some guys go there just for the buildings.

If we want to make the shift toward round or elliptic houses, some adjustments are in order. We are going to need some round back furniture, elliptic carpets etc. It is obviously not as easy as manufacturing stuff for rectangle shaped spaces, but I think a few world-wide industry standard radiuses can do the job. I foresee that in a few decades we’ll get fully accustomed to round buildings and all these straight angles will feel like a key scratch on a Ferrari.

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p.s. The black piano keys sit above the white ones; is this a case of positive discrimination?

Time Travelers, Please Proceed to Gate Number 42

Last night while watching Hiro Nakamura and Nathan Petrelli doing their thing on Heroes, I came to the conclusion that strolling through the forth dimension is much more fun than flying through the other three. While time traveling seems like a great way to spend your weekends, is it feasible?

Forward time traveling is relatively simple. It can be achieved by accelerating to extremely high speed or by getting close to an extremely big mass. As predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity - time is subjective. For example, you can go on a one minute high speed trip only to return to Earth to discover you have just missed a whole decade back at home. A real-life example is the cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev that spent a total of 748 days on the Russian space station Mir and missed a whole 0.02 seconds on Earth.

Although that DeLorean looked really cool on Marty McFly, backward time traveling may be theoretically or practically impossible. Some claim it can be done using wormholes, black holes or other abnormalities of spacetime, while others claim it exists only in science fiction.

If backward time traveling is possible, where are all the tourists from the future? Even if it will be illegal in the future to go back to the past, I’m sure some would break the law eventually.
Possible explanations are:
1. Backward time travel is not possible.
2. It’s theoretically possible but practically impossible.
3. It can be done, but we will destroy ourselves before achieving this.
4. It will be done in the future, but time machines allow you only to go back as far as the time the machine was created.

A famous problem is the grandfather paradox, where a man travels back in time and kills his own grandfather before the latter met the traveler's grandmother. As a result of this act, the traveler could not have been born, so how can he later travel back in time? Some see this paradox as a death blow to backward time travel possibility, but although definitely weird, I think the only problem here is that it’s not aligned with our intuition. Because human logic was developed by evolutionary process in order to better hide from lions and hunt zebras more effectively, I don’t see a big problem in the fact that 21st century thought experiments regarding traveling through the forth dimension don’t appear logical to us hunter-gatherers.

No need to comment on this post since I have just been back from the future and already read all your comments.

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p.s. Every time a lightning hits the Eiffel Tower there’s a 78% chance your wife’s on the phone.