Superintelligence

I’m reading (listening to, actually) Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and finding it unexpectedly very interesting. The book focuses on artificial intelligence, but early on he talks about possibilities for enhancing biological intelligence using current or near-future technology. Here’s an online paper where he talks about the same concept. Just using current in vitro fertilization technology, which creates about 10 embryos at a time, you could theoretically boost IQ by about 11 points if you pick just the smartest of the 10. (This is just a thought experiment so let’s not worry about the other 9. Of course, some otherwise reasonable people are going to have an ethical problem with this.) Do that 10 times in a row and you could theoretically boost IQ by 100 points or more. Einstein had an IQ of about 160. So you can produce a race of super-Einstein’s using current technology. Now, it would take 250 years to do this, and you would have to get everybody to do it, both to make a real impact at the societal level, and to avoid disturbing implications of those left behind.

Using a likely near-future technology called iterative embryo selection, you can theoretically extract the DNA from one or more embryos, move it to sperm and egg cells, combine them again to make a new set of embryos, and do it again. This might take a few years or months to go the 10 generations of 1-in-10, rather than 250 years. Now it’s potentially something big.

I’m a bit worried about super-villains. I don’t see any reason to think twice-as-smart humans will automatically be twice as ethical or twice as empathetic, and it might only take one really bad apple to ruin whatever utopia our newly brilliant problem solving selves come up with.

Like I said, the book is really about artificial intelligence. He believes that even humans enhanced to have, say, double the current average IQ will eventually be far outclassed by machines. It is not going to take 250 years for that to happen, so creating smarter humans in 250 years won’t make a lot of sense. If we create smarter humans in the short term, he thinks they will just use their smarts to make smarter machines even sooner.

This is just scratching the surface. It’s really a fascinating book, and somewhat like when I first read The Singularity is Near, I kind of feel like I am being let in on secrets that nobody else around me knows.

what to eat for your own health and the planet

Walter Willet, Johan Rockstrom, and others have published a long paper on what we should be eating, both for health and sustainability, and how that food ought to be produced.

Scientific targets for a healthy reference diet are based on extensive literature on foods, dietary patterns, and health outcomes. This healthy reference diet largely consists of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and unsaturated oils, includes a low to moderate amount of seafood and poultry, and includes no or a low quantity of red meat, processed meat, added sugar, refined grains, and starchy vegetables.

Blue Origin and The High Frontier

I was listening to a Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast focusing on Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin. He doesn’t publicize his space activities as aggressively as Elon Musk, but he is serious apparently. The interviewee is Christian Davenport, author of a book called The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. He says that one of Bezos’s inspirations is an older book called The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard O’Neill. Here’s an excerpt from the Amazon description of that book:

In 1974, Dr. O’Neill put his three-pronged plan of Space Colonization, Space Solar Power and Large Scale Space Construction into easily accessible form with the release of the book The High Frontier. Fourteen years later, The Space Studies Institute, founded by O’Neill, re-released the original text, unchanged except for the doctor’s addition of the Appendix “A View from 1988…”

This is one of the milestone and timeless classics of Space Habitation, Alternative Power and Human Potential, all made possible with technology we already have. A Must-Read.

this year’s doomsday clock

The good news is the clock has not been moved any closer to midnight. The bad news there are only two minutes to go, which is as close as they put it at any point during the cold war. The reasons they give are climate change and, yes, good old nuclear weapons.

In the nuclear realm, the United States abandoned the Iran nuclear deal and announced it would withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), grave steps towards a complete dismantlement of the global arms control process. Although the United States and North Korea moved away from the bellicose rhetoric of 2017, the urgent North Korean nuclear dilemma remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the world’s nuclear nations proceeded with programs of “nuclear modernization” that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

socialism, capitalism, and inequality

This article on History News Network sums it up pretty well. Socialism doesn’t work well when it means an authoritarian government controlling all aspects of the economy in the name of “the people” (e.g., the Soviet Union). Capitalism works well for an elite few but does not work well for the majority when it allows private wealth to hijack the political process (e.g., the United States, especially in recent decades).

There is a formula that works pretty well. It’s almost boringly simple and yet seems depressingly out of reach for the U.S. as long as wealthy individuals and industries are able to buy elections and write the nation’s laws to continue stacking the deck in their favor, while using our free speech protections to wage an effective propaganda war so that the public actually supports this.

It’s a common mistake of both left and right to talk about capitalism and socialism as if there were only two choices. One-party socialist systems in less developed countries have not worked well over the past century. Capitalism as practiced in the United States and many other nations has mainly benefitted those who already are wealthy. The nations in which all citizens gain from economic growth have combined elements of market economies, private ownership, and political policies that mitigate inequality. In western Europe, public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making result in much lower inequality and much happier populations.

Oslo has removed onstreet parking

Oslo has apparently removed all or most onstreet parking.


“Cities, like Oslo, have been built for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, said in an email. “I think it is important that we all think about what kind of cities we want to live in. I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars.”

To help support the shift, the city made “massive improvements in public transport and making cycling safe and comfortable,” says Rune Gjøs, Oslo’s head of cycling. The city is adding new trams and metro lines and more frequent departures, and lowering the cost of tickets. For the last few years, the city has also been quickly building out a better-connected bike network, converting parking to bright-red bike lanes. It handed out grants to help citizens buy electric bikes. The city bike-share system has quickly grown, tripling to nearly 3 million trips a year between 2015 and 2018.

As more people bike, that opens up room on overcrowded public transit. “Usually when you have these discussions you say, ‘Oh, we need bikes to replace cars,’ but there’s a missing link there, and that’s public transit,” says Bentsen. “What we see is that actually we take people out of the bus and onto the bike and walking, which leaves room for people to leave their car and take the bus.”

What, no entitlement to use part of the public realm to store my car for free?

Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception

DARPA is funding research into defense against AI attacks.

The growing sophistication and ubiquity of ML components in advanced systems dramatically increases capabilities, but as a byproduct, increases opportunities for new, potentially unidentified vulnerabilities. The acceleration in ML attack capabilities has promoted an arms race: As defenses are developed to address new attack strategies and vulnerabilities, improved attack methodologies capable of bypassing the defense algorithms are created. The field now appears increasingly pessimistic, sensing that developing effective ML defenses may prove significantly more difficult than designing new attacks, leaving advanced systems vulnerable and exposed. Further, the lack of a comprehensive theoretical understanding of ML vulnerabilities in the “Adversarial Examples” field leaves significant exploitable blind spots in advanced systems and limits efforts to develop effective defenses.

fracking with explosives in China

China has a plan to pump shale gas using explosives. The headline grabs attention by suggesting they might be nuclear weapons, but in reality they are using the tape of explosion that sets off a nuclear weapon, which is a conventional charge directed in a very precise direction.

The problem is that 80 per cent of its deposits are located more than 3,500 metres (11,500 feet) below sea level, which is far beyond the range of hydraulic fracturing, the standard method for extraction.

But all that could be about to change, after a team of nuclear weapons scientists led by Professor Zhang Yongming from the State Key Laboratory of Controlled Shock Waves at Xian Jiaotong University in Shaanxi province, released details of a new “energy rod” that has the power to plumb depths never before thought possible.