Transhumanism/Singularity/nanotechnology

[apsec112]

Hey everyone. I've been lurking on this board for several months now, and I've noticed that a lot of people here have negative/skeptical attitudes towards the technological Singularity, transhumanism, molecular nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence, mind uploading and so on. I'd like to have a general discussion about these topics, but the moderators suggested that I start by pointing out some things from past threads and commenting on those, so to begin, from this thread:

God damn you transhumanists are stupid.

Yes. The instructions for being intelligent are stored in our DNA. But there is not an intelligence gene. It is a complex network of regulatory genes that also play roles regulating our other developmental processes combined with specific genes that control the development of certain structures. It is not a nice neat set of instructions. It is a freakishly complex morass of instructions that would probably fuck up the development of any animal we tried to uplift.

To say nothing about most of them not having a brain case of sufficient size.

This is certainly a valid point about creating intelligent dolphins, chimps, etc. being difficult, but it says little about whether it is possible, or even how long it would take. History shows that, although there is obviously some correlation between technological difficulty and development time, it does sometimes happen that very complex things are done more quickly than very simple things. For instance, it has taken us less than forty years to build up the entire stack of microprocessors -> personal computers -> Internet -> World Wide Web -> Web applications that allows us to use Facebook. Yet, some very simple technologies, like processing coal into oil and the electric car, remain un-developed since they were invented in the early 20th century. Complexity does not imply that building something will take centuries.

A single living cell is more complicated than any modern computer.

I think this is simply factually incorrect. As of 2001 (now nine years obsolete), even if you just counted the software available on a typical Linux computer (not incuding hardware etc.), it added up to more than thirty million lines of source code. Assume, fairly generously, that each line of source code is equivalent to a single DNA base pair, even though a base pair is two bits of raw information, while a line of code is usually hundreds of bits. Even then, the computer's software is many times more complex than a bacterium, whose genomes tend to be around 1-10 million base pairs in size (cite). I really don't think this should be surprising; evolution is limited to adding a small number of bits per generation, and has an upper bound on total information content per organism (cite), while humans have neither of these limitations. I find it odd that we as a species continue to be in awe at the works of evolution, even though this past century has essentially consisted of humans finding ways to do things better than evolution can (radio and Internet are faster than sound for communication, planes fly faster than birds, machines can live in environments too extreme for any extremophile, computers can crunch numbers better than humans, etc.).

The only way you can have a truly unlimited-resources society is if there's some point where people go "You know, I don't really want a bigger house" and society is left with a glut of resources it doesn't want to use -- and anyone who understands basic human psychology or economics knows that that's a very bad thing, if it happens at all.

I think this has already happened, essentially. There's a huge glut of very low-cost stuff just lying around everywhere (look at eBay), with the primary cost of many items being shipping. The things that are expensive in modern society aren't physical products, but those things whose manufacture is artificially kept expensive because of legal restrictions by guilds (medical services, legal services, education, real estate, etc.). I think we could already have transitioned to an essentially post-scarcity society, where all necessities and certain categories of luxuries could be had for free, if it weren't for obsolete political and corporate systems.

Even if it were possible given practically infinite time, resources, and expertise, society will not appropriate the resources to create novelty organisms that satisfy your weird fantasies, for any number of practical, economic, and ethical reasons.

Although "no limits" is of course a fallacy, I think the general principle that things that seem hard nowadays won't always be hard is very important to understand. Consider, to a Roman, how preposterous something like the Internet would seem. You'd have to have millions of people all over the countryside who spent all day yelling messages at each other, so that a message could be quickly passed from one person to another person, and the messages would get garbled if people misheard them slightly a thousand times over, and you'd have to have infrastructure to give all of these people food and housing, and etc. etc. etc., it would obviously be completely impractical. (I'm sure there are other possible implementations, but they all strike me as being equally impractical.) Yet, here we are.

We have to program this thing to be able to do things like perform higher math and mimic having an actual biological intelligence. It will be limited in its ability to do these things by the human programmer who initially creates it and as a result will be limited in its understanding of higher math to the degree that the programmer understood higher math.

This is an obvious fallacy; nowhere is it written that a creation must be stupider than its creator. Evolution has no intelligence at all, and it created us. More recently, none of the humans who wrote Deep Blue could play chess anywhere near as well as it could.

You're confusing the transhumanist movement in general with the Near Singularian subset of it, which is kind of like confusing, say, the Left Wing in general with people who think that Gaia is alive and there's an evil industrialist conspiracy to steal our brainwaves.

I am wondering which group of people is being referred to here. I'm on the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association, and I've never heard the term "Near Singularian" (I assume you mean "Near Singularitarian"). Obviously, there are eccentrics, crackpots, etc. in every group, but I can't think of any cohesive, organized groups within transhumanism that all collectively agree on the same, obviously absurd ideas.

Anyway, I think that's enough for one post, there are certainly other points I'd like to bring up but I figure those can be done later.

[Broomstick]

Hey everyone. I've been lurking on this board for several months now, and I've noticed that a lot of people here have negative/skeptical attitudes towards the technological Singularity, transhumanism, molecular nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence, mind uploading and so on. I'd like to have a general discussion about these topics, but the moderators suggested that I start by pointing out some things from past threads and commenting on those, so to begin...

Well, you get points for actually reading prior threads and more for listening to the mods from the get go.

God damn you transhumanists are stupid.

Yes. The instructions for being intelligent are stored in our DNA. But there is not an intelligence gene. It is a complex network of regulatory genes that also play roles regulating our other developmental processes combined with specific genes that control the development of certain structures. It is not a nice neat set of instructions. It is a freakishly complex morass of instructions that would probably fuck up the development of any animal we tried to uplift.

To say nothing about most of them not having a brain case of sufficient size.

This is certainly a valid point about creating intelligent dolphins, chimps, etc. being difficult, but it says little about whether it is possible, or even how long it would take. History shows that, although there is obviously some correlation between technological difficulty and development time, it does sometimes happen that very complex things are done more quickly than very simple things.

First of all - we HAVE had some incredibly stupid and naive tech-worshippers gush about transhumanism in the past on this board, which has had the effect of pissing in the pool for all transhumanists that show up. Unfortunately for you, if you're one of the intelligent ones.

Yes, sometimes apparent complexity can be easier to achieve than apparent simplicity. It is, however, by no means universal.

For instance, it has taken us less than forty years to build up the entire stack of microprocessors -> personal computers -> Internet -> World Wide Web -> Web applications that allows us to use Facebook. Yet, some very simple technologies, like processing coal into oil and the electric car, remain un-developed since they were invented in the early 20th century. Complexity does not imply that building something will take centuries.

Technologies that convert coal into oil and allow for electric cars have, actually, been developed and have advanced throughout the 20th Century. The issue with them, though, is one of economics and not feasibility. It's cheaper to drill for oil, even in difficult environments, than to convert coal to oil, and consumes less energy as well. In the case of electric cars, it's a matter of weight-to-power ratios grossly favoring gasoline engines over electric batteries until very recently. They both deal with limitations of energy concentration, as opposed to computers and communications which do not involve the same sort of energy and efficiency trade offs as your two other examples.

In other words, you're not comparing apples to oranges (fruit to fruit) but apples to turnips (fruit to vegetable).

A single living cell is more complicated than any modern computer.

I think this is simply factually incorrect. As of 2001 (now nine years obsolete), even if you just counted the software available on a typical Linux computer (not incuding hardware etc.), it added up to more than thirty million lines of source code. Assume, fairly generously, that each line of source code is equivalent to a single DNA base pair, even though a base pair is two bits of raw information, while a line of code is usually hundreds of bits. Even then, the computer's software is many times more complex than a bacterium, whose genomes tend to be around 1-10 million base pairs in size (cite). I really don't think this should be surprising; evolution is limited to adding a small number of bits per generation, and has an upper bound on total information content per organism (cite), while humans have neither of these limitations. I find it odd that we as a species continue to be in awe at the works of evolution, even though this past century has essentially consisted of humans finding ways to do things better than evolution can (radio and Internet are faster than sound for communication, planes fly faster than birds, machines can live in environments too extreme for any extremophile, computers can crunch numbers better than humans, etc.).

The amazing thing about evolution is that it happened without intelligence being involved.

I also question your "evolution can only add a small number of bits per generation". Among plants, there are species that have doubled the chromosomes in the cells of their descendants, adding tens of thousands of bits in one stroke, called polyploidy. It's most common in plants, particularly flowering ones, but can occur in animals and other life forms. It can be artificially induced, but occurs naturally as well and is important in agriculture (many domestic plants are polyploid, such as potatoes and wheat, wheat coming in the normal diploid variety as well as tetraploid (durum and pasta wheat) and even hexaploid for some bread flours). When organisms can double their genetic information through a single act of reproduction I have to conclude your assumption that only "a few bits" of information can be added per generation is deeply flawed.

I think you're also making some flawed assumptions about genetics and how it works, but I'll leave that for another post or, even better one of our genetic experts to tackle.

But, moving along - something like radio is "better" for communication only if you consider limited circumstances. For example, both internet and radio are dependent on electrical power - if you don't have that both are useless whereas sound production does not require a power source external to a creature, or even vocal cords for that matter. Yes, planes fly faster and higher than birds, but require fossil fuels difficult to acquire whereas birds are powered by readily available organic materials. New birds are produced far more cheaply than aircraft as well, and come with a pretty useful AI and navigational "computer" on board, one that doesn't require calibration or a "constellation" of satellites to maintain, and birds can perform their own maintenance. Given that quite a few species have lifespans of decades they compare favorably in durability to man-made aircraft as well. Oh, and there's that variable wing geometry that birds have that we just haven't made practical (yet) where they can alter the shape of their wings for optimum performance in different types of flight. Remember, though - no one designed birds, there was no intelligence involved in their evolution. That's the really amazing thing about evolution, really.

So, if you want to haul 10 tons of cargo across an ocean yeah, a cargo plane works better than a goose. For hunting rabbits, though, we haven't got anything that will beat a hawk. And folks are trying to encourage barn owls to breed more because their such darned efficient mouse-killers, and cheaper than bait and traps. Which is better depends on how you're measuring.

As for machines functioning better in extreme environments - well, yes, if they are designed for a specific environment they'll usually do better than a randomly evolved creature, but organics do have a certain flexibility that machines don't. For example, most animals that ambulate at all climb stairs far better than all than a very few, very specialized stair-climbing machines which, frankly, don't do anything much beyond stairclimbing whereas those animals not only go up and down stairs they do a lot of other things, too.

Organic lifeforms are usually generalists - they do a lot of different things and are not dependent on a high specific environment. Machines in specific environments and contexts outperform organics but outside of narrow parameters don't do well at all.

The only way you can have a truly unlimited-resources society is if there's some point where people go "You know, I don't really want a bigger house" and society is left with a glut of resources it doesn't want to use -- and anyone who understands basic human psychology or economics knows that that's a very bad thing, if it happens at all.

I think this has already happened, essentially. There's a huge glut of very low-cost stuff just lying around everywhere (look at eBay), with the primary cost of many items being shipping. The things that are expensive in modern society aren't physical products, but those things whose manufacture is artificially kept expensive because of legal restrictions by guilds (medical services, legal services, education, real estate, etc.). I think we could already have transitioned to an essentially post-scarcity society, where all necessities and certain categories of luxuries could be had for free, if it weren't for obsolete political and corporate systems.

Good lord, I'm not sure where to begin...

Yes, there is inexpensive stuff on eBay. This is hardly proof of a post-scarcity society. It's like saying that because there's a glut of vacant homes in my county there's no housing crisis. In fact, there IS a housing crisis in my county, most of those homes are empty due to foreclosure, and their former residents either doubling up with family or outright homeless. Yes there are empty homes, but many of those needing homes can't afford housing at current prices with their current paychecks or lack thereof. And if you don't think houses aren't expensive, or aren't physical... I'm not sure what I can say to you.

You also suggest some sort of collusion to keep prices up, such as doctors conspiring to keep medical prices up. In fact, some of the best of modern medical technology is, in fact, expensive to produce purely due to the material costs and not because of collusion. MRI's, for example, are expensive due to rare materials used in their magnets and the need to use liquid helium to cool them. Some of the PET contrast materials are artificially produced radioactive isotopes with half lives so short they need to be flown by private jet to where they will be used - neither the contrast material nor the transportation is cheap due to physical constraints that can't be hand-waved away. There is no way to extend the half lives of the isotopes so as to allow for the use of slower, less expensive transportation.

Your argument might carry some weight for legal services or education (nevermind there are lower cost, quality alternatives to premium services in those areas) but real estate values have, in fact, been falling in recent years which is hardly a sign of a conspiracy to artificially inflate prices.

On top of that, the idea that necessities could ever be free is ... bizarre. Do you think food materializes in the store? Considerable land must be held for agriculture, and considerable labor and resources goes into producing food. Are you suggesting that these resources and the labor involved have no value? Clothing needs to be either produced from agricultural products (natural fibers, leather) or industrial processes that typically require feedstock derived from petroleum which must be mined, refined, and transported before production can even begin. Again, on what basis do you think any of this could be free under any circumstances?

Until we have free energy in abundance and something like Star Trek replicators necessities will NOT be free. And I'm pretty sure that we aren't going to have those any time soon, if ever.

Although "no limits" is of course a fallacy, I think the general principle that things that seem hard nowadays won't always be hard is very important to understand. Consider, to a Roman, how preposterous something like the Internet would seem. You'd have to have millions of people all over the countryside who spent all day yelling messages at each other, so that a message could be quickly passed from one person to another person, and the messages would get garbled if people misheard them slightly a thousand times over, and you'd have to have infrastructure to give all of these people food and housing, and etc. etc. etc., it would obviously be completely impractical. (I'm sure there are other possible implementations, but they all strike me as being equally impractical.) Yet, here we are.

I fail to see how you have to explain the internet as people standing in fields shouting at each other. How... bizarre. Really, where did you get this notion? The idea of sending messages over distances wasn't foreign to the Romans, who had means of signaling over distances, and who understood such things as writing or making copies of a communication. Clearly, the internet is much faster than Roman methods but the basic concept of communication would hardly be foreign. Email or text message are just faster versions of the letter writing they used. Websites and online databases are analogous to public posting of information or town criers or libraries.

I'm on the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association

Really? How interesting. Can you prove your claimed credentials?

[apsec112]

First of all - we HAVE had some incredibly stupid and naive tech-worshippers gush about transhumanism in the past on this board, which has had the effect of pissing in the pool for all transhumanists that show up. Unfortunately for you, if you're one of the intelligent ones.

Sorry about that. I've had some experience dealing with stupid people and it's been very difficult for us too.

Technologies that convert coal into oil and allow for electric cars have, actually, been developed and have advanced throughout the 20th Century.

Of course these technologies have advanced somewhat, eg. we have lithium batteries now, as opposed to early 20th-century lead batteries. When I said "developed", I meant that we haven't actually gone and built all the infrastructure and factories and distribution systems and repair shops and so on that we need for people to actually use the technology. The amount of money invested in both, except under very special circumstances (eg. Nazi Germany and South Africa for coal -> oil, right now with government subsidies and easy VC money for electric cars), has been quite minimal. The point is that, just as complexity doesn't mean something will take five hundred years to reach the consumer market, simplicity doesn't mean that something will quickly reach the consumer market. Complexity or difficulty of research and development isn't a good predictor of how long it will take to reach the consumer; some more important things are actual usefulness (which is the problem with "uplifting"), and economic considerations (as you point out).

Among plants, there are species that have doubled the chromosomes in the cells of their descendants, adding tens of thousands of bits in one stroke, called polyploidy.

Just doubling the number of chromosomes doesn't increase the amount of information, because the new chromosomes are just exact copies of the old chromosomes. If I take a book, copy it, and then print a new book which contains two copies of the old book (but nothing else), the new book doesn't contain any information that the old book doesn't; you won't gain anything extra by reading it that you wouldn't get by reading the old book. In information-theoretic terms, if I have 100 MB of data that compresses to 20 MB, and I copy the 100 MB of data to get 200 MB, the 200 MB will still compress to 20 MB, because you can just include a short "duplicate the above" instruction at the end of the compressed data (which the de-compression program will then use to re-create all 200 MB).

Of course, as the plant evolves, the new chromosomes can gradually become different from the old chromosomes, increasing the amount of information. But that takes thousands of generations.

For example, both internet and radio are dependent on electrical power - if you don't have that both are useless whereas sound production does not require a power source external to a creature, or even vocal cords for that matter.

Of course sound production requires an external power source. In the case of living creatures, it's just food rather than electric current or batteries. Internet and radio don't really require an external source either, by your definition of external (OLPC laptops and zillions of radios are hand-cranked). In terms of information transmitted per unit of energy used, the Internet is way more efficient than sound. The laptop I'm using can transmit a megabyte of information, about the same as a full book, in about a second, using less than 10 joules. Imagine how much energy it would take for a human to read that entire book out loud.

Yes, planes fly faster and higher than birds, but require fossil fuels difficult to acquire whereas birds are powered by readily available organic materials.

Small planes can run on ethanol (cite). I'm not sure how much work it would take to modify a jet engine to run on ethanol, but I assume it could be done without too much difficulty, albeit with some loss of efficiency.

and come with a pretty useful AI and navigational "computer" on board, one that doesn't require calibration or a "constellation" of satellites to maintain, and birds can perform their own maintenance.

Most bird navigation systems suck compared to modern-day anything, even just a guy with a map. A guy with a map can find his way from one specific area of one specific city on one side of the US all the way to one specific area of one specific city on the other side, three thousand miles away.

Given that quite a few species have lifespans of decades they compare favorably in durability to man-made aircraft as well.

Plenty of aircraft from fifty years ago are still in use; how many birds have lifespans of > 50 years?

Remember, though - no one designed birds, there was no intelligence involved in their evolution. That's the really amazing thing about evolution, really.

I do agree with you there.

For hunting rabbits, though, we haven't got anything that will beat a hawk.

We have shotguns, those seem to work pretty well. Heck, human spears are thought to have driven dozens of species extinct at the end of the last Ice Age.

For example, most animals that ambulate at all climb stairs far better than all than a very few, very specialized stair-climbing machines which, frankly, don't do anything much beyond stairclimbing whereas those animals not only go up and down stairs they do a lot of other things, too.

Point, although I think we'll soon (before 2020) have technology that can do that as well.

Yes, there is inexpensive stuff on eBay. This is hardly proof of a post-scarcity society.

I wasn't trying to show that we were in a post-scarcity society. Heck, I essentially said the opposite, by saying that the reason we weren't in a post-scarcity society was largely political and not technological. I was just saying that we do, in fact, have a huge glut of stuff that we don't seem to want to use, which is what the section I quoted was discussing.

It's like saying that because there's a glut of vacant homes in my county there's no housing crisis. In fact, there IS a housing crisis in my county, most of those homes are empty due to foreclosure, and their former residents either doubling up with family or outright homeless. Yes there are empty homes, but many of those needing homes can't afford housing at current prices with their current paychecks or lack thereof.

I think we basically agree that our society has a glut of physical stuff that isn't being used, but is fucked up in other ways.

And if you don't think houses aren't expensive, or aren't physical... I'm not sure what I can say to you.

Houses are still somewhat expensive, but I think that a majority of their price can be explained by the education guild, zoning laws, and various other political factors. Elizabeth Warren found (cite) that the largest single predictor of a home's price was the school district that it was located in. Essentially, by taking a monopoly on education and then making education depend on where you live, the government has hugely and artificially inflated home prices in large areas of the United States, particularly in suburbia.

You also suggest some sort of collusion to keep prices up, such as doctors conspiring to keep medical prices up.

Yes, I think this is fairly obvious. Why, for instance, have no new med schools been opened until very recently, despite the supply of pre-meds far exceeding demand? Only one new med school was opened from 1980 to 2000 (cite). It's largely because the AMA won't authorize them, because having a shortage of doctors ensures high prices. Classic guild/monopoly behavior.

In fact, some of the best of modern medical technology is, in fact, expensive to produce purely due to the material costs and not because of collusion.

This is always true for the very latest technology, but medical costs for everything have been going way up, not just costs for the latest tech. A year or two back I had an ingrown toenail treated. How much technology does that require? We've been doing that the same way for fifty years. Yet it cost $300 (before insurance), for fifteen minutes' of a doctor's time. Here's a handy graph.

real estate values have, in fact, been falling in recent years which is hardly a sign of a conspiracy to artificially inflate prices.

I don't think so, it just means that the conspiracy stopped working so well. There's an EXPLICIT conspiracy by the US federal government to inflate home prices by providing subsidies to homeowners, in the form of tax deduction for mortgage interest, and more recently in the form of tax credits for buying a new home.

On top of that, the idea that necessities could ever be free is ... bizarre.

Of course they wouldn't be free to produce. The idea is that they'd be cheap enough to be provided for free to everyone by government subsidy, without crushingly large costs. Heck, the ancient Romans did that by providing free grain to the urban poor. Panem et circenses.

I fail to see how you have to explain the internet as people standing in fields shouting at each other. How... bizarre. Really, where did you get this notion?

It's the closest thing I could think of that ancient Romans could visualize to our modern Internet, where information travels faster than people or horses can travel physically. You could also use chains of fire or smoke signals, etc.

Clearly, the internet is much faster than Roman methods but the basic concept of communication would hardly be foreign.

The point of the Internet isn't just "communication", it's communication from anyone in the country, to anyone else, at speeds much faster than you could get by actually going and visiting the other person. To get that in Roman times, you'd need huge elaborate networks of people yelling across large distances, or fire signals or something.

Really? How interesting. Can you prove your claimed credentials?

Yes. My name is Thomas McCabe, you can see my biography on the World Transhumanist Association website at http://humanityplus.org/about/board/. (The World Transhumanist Association began using the brand name of Humanity+ in 2008; see this article.) My email address is thomas.mccabe@yale.edu; the moderators can verify this if they wish, or you could just email me.

[Singular Intellect]

If you're interested in discussing the potential singularity, perhaps you could elaborate for others on the exponential growth curve of technological progress throughout human history?

I've begun to notice quite more frequently the widespread mentality of linear thinking and projections based on that premise, despite all the evidence to the contrary and which is also not limited to human technology.

[apsec112]

If you're interested in discussing the potential singularity, perhaps you could elaborate for others on the exponential growth curve of technological progress throughout human history?

Technological progress overall is not growing exponentially. We're coming off the end of a long boom of growth which began in the 1600s during the Enlightenment, accelerated up until the early 20th century, stalled during WWI and has been gradually slowing down ever since. If you compare the US to the Roman Empire, we're at about 200 AD (~500 BC -> ~1770 AD, ~200 BC -> 1860 AD, ~50 BC -> 1930 AD).

We've found that many parameters for measuring performance of information technology are exponentially increasing, which makes the future of such technologies (relatively) easy to predict. For instance, the cost, size, performance, etc. of a 2010 computer could be calculated in 2000 fairly accurately, just by taking a bunch of exponential trends and extrapolating them. However, people should not confuse exponential growth in hard drive space, clock speed, bandwidth etc. as being equivalent to exponential economic growth; a thousand times as many clock cycles aren't worth a thousand times as much. Which would you rather have: access to a 1999 computer all the time, or access to a 2009 computer for ten minutes a week?

The point isn't that technological progress itself is accelerating exponentially, but rather that fairly ordinary technological progress will have very profound effects. If growth is constant, we should expect the world in 2110 to look as different from now as the world in 1910, and anyone who's ever read a history book will know that that's a really big gap. The population, GDP per capita, and life expectancy of the United States in 1910 were roughly comparable to that of the Roman Empire in 100 AD.

[Broomstick]

Of course these technologies have advanced somewhat, eg. we have lithium batteries now, as opposed to early 20th-century lead batteries. When I said "developed", I meant that we haven't actually gone and built all the infrastructure and factories and distribution systems and repair shops and so on that we need for people to actually use the technology. The amount of money invested in both, except under very special circumstances (eg. Nazi Germany and South Africa for coal -> oil, right now with government subsidies and easy VC money for electric cars), has been quite minimal. The point is that, just as complexity doesn't mean something will take five hundred years to reach the consumer market, simplicity doesn't mean that something will quickly reach the consumer market. Complexity or difficulty of research and development isn't a good predictor of how long it will take to reach the consumer; some more important things are actual usefulness (which is the problem with "uplifting"), and economic considerations (as you point out).

In other words "Where's my flying car, dammit?! We were promised flying cars by the 21st Century!" Just because something is cool, desirable, or even somewhat useful doesn't mean it will become commonly available. Various factors such as cost, needed infrastructure, the laws of physics, and human variables come into play.

In the early 20th Century you had not only gas and diesel powered cars but also electric and steam. Gasoline won out for a variety of reasons, including the fact that gasoline was a more concentrated fuel, giving more energy/mileage per unit than alternatives, and easier to store and transport than fuels such as propane, methane, or hydrogen. It wasn't that something like a steam driven car didn't work - they did work just fine, and for a time were faster and capable of carrying larger loads - but the gasoline powered automobile became more efficient by several criteria. Once a massive infrastructure was in place it then granted gasoline cars considerable inertia so that switching over to an alternate power source not only requires equal efficiency in operation but also requires and additional incentive to overcome that inertia or weight of tradition. An alternate fuel source car today has larger hurdles to over come than a gasoline powered car in 1910.

That is, by the way, one of the reasons we don't have flying cars - the inertia of automobiles. Back before the current economic crash I had the money to fly small airplanes wherever I wanted to go. By many measures they are a superior means to travel - the airplanes I had access to flew up to 2-3 times highway speeds and could go over rather than around obstacles, and the ones I was flying, despite some of them being 30-40 years old, had a gas mileage better than some rather common SUV's on the highway these days. However, the infrastructure to support small airplanes for personal travel is lacking in comparison to the modern road network, despite the US having significantly more airports than any other country. I had gotten to the point where, from a viewpoint of operating the machine, jumping into a small airplane wasn't significantly different than taking my car on a trip, but there were logistical barriers on either end for a small plane that didn't exist for a car, and the problem of needing to get from the airport to your final destination by some means. If we hadn't built the extensive system of roads then using small airplanes to get around would have been more appealing than driving everywhere, though we'd still have ground vehicles. As proof I offer up Alaska, which utilizes small air transport FAR more than anywhere else in the country, has more pilots than anywhere else (both licensed and unlicensed - flying is so damn useful there that lots of folks learn how to do it informally), and many places are reachable primarily by air because no one ever built roads going to them. If the rest of the world had the sort of road "system" Alaska does flying would be as common as driving is today and "flying cars" would make more sense. But we've been building roads for thousands of years, they have enormous cultural inertia.

(There are other factors in the lack of flying cars as well, which I can expand upon if anyone is interested)

Among plants, there are species that have doubled the chromosomes in the cells of their descendants, adding tens of thousands of bits in one stroke, called polyploidy.

Just doubling the number of chromosomes doesn't increase the amount of information, because the new chromosomes are just exact copies of the old chromosomes. If I take a book, copy it, and then print a new book which contains two copies of the old book (but nothing else), the new book doesn't contain any information that the old book doesn't; you won't gain anything extra by reading it that you wouldn't get by reading the old book. In information-theoretic terms, if I have 100 MB of data that compresses to 20 MB, and I copy the 100 MB of data to get 200 MB, the 200 MB will still compress to 20 MB, because you can just include a short "duplicate the above" instruction at the end of the compressed data (which the de-compression program will then use to re-create all 200 MB).

Of course, as the plant evolves, the new chromosomes can gradually become different from the old chromosomes, increasing the amount of information. But that takes thousands of generations.

Except genes are not read as books are read. Again, I am not an expert in this area and I wish one of our more knowledgeable people would speak up, but genes have start and stop codes, information that starts at one point may be interupted and resume elsewhere with "junk" in the middle, and so forth so that doubling chromosomes can have much greater effect than you'd expect from mere duplication. The existence of homeoboxes means a single mutation can have profound effects in multiple places, radically altering the resulting organism or leading to unexpected effects. If you took two different books in a related area, say, two different books on Roman history, and from them created a new book from them, where the first page is from one book, the second from the other, and so on interleaving the pages you'd get nonsense. But if you cross a horse and zebra you get a viable creature - which, oddly enough, has more stripes than a zebra, not fewer (actually, not odd at all if you know a few facts about how zebra stripes form on the embryo). While describing genes as letters or words and a chromosome as a book is a useful analogy to a point genes are not words and the analogy is imperfect.

There is also the fact that genes, even entire chromosomes can be lost via evolution. For something DNA based it clearly is about more than sheer quantity of information, or at least quantity of genes. Genes arguably have more redundancy than the written word, which is less efficient in some ways but when you're relying on copying instructions over and over for billions of years (which is what life has done on this planet) redundancy and copy repair becomes at least as important as efficiency. Again, you have be careful what, exactly, your yardstick is measuring and you have to be careful about the context in which you are functioning.

For example, both internet and radio are dependent on electrical power - if you don't have that both are useless whereas sound production does not require a power source external to a creature, or even vocal cords for that matter.

Of course sound production requires an external power source. In the case of living creatures, it's just food rather than electric current or batteries. Internet and radio don't really require an external source either, by your definition of external (OLPC laptops and zillions of radios are hand-cranked). In terms of information transmitted per unit of energy used, the Internet is way more efficient than sound. The laptop I'm using can transmit a megabyte of information, about the same as a full book, in about a second, using less than 10 joules. Imagine how much energy it would take for a human to read that entire book out loud.

Again, the yardstick and context matters. "Just food" is an external energy source, yes, but it's amazingly common in the world, isn't it? I can go into my backyard and gather up 2-3 different edible plants growing wild. To a large extent, food is just lying around for the taking from the perspective of an animal. So, while by some measures chemically fueled vocal cords are less efficient than the printed word, or digital storage media, powering them is easy. On this planet. If you're on Mars food as we know it just doesn't exist, and solar power - which is just "lying around" suddenly because the fuel of choice. Which is why Mars rovers run on it instead of gasoline or apples.

The internet is only efficient if you have the material objects and infrastructure for it in place, a source of power suited to it, and a means of maintaining it all. Until machines become independent of people, able to reproduce and care for themselves, you still have have the featherless bipeds doing a lot of the work. Fortunately, featherless bipeds are efficient at reproducing themselves in the current environment. Actually, they're a little too good at it, their sheer numbers are having some undesirable effects. Internet, radio, TV, telephones, and all those other electronic-based communications are not self-maintaining. Living creatures are. If every electronic device disappeared tomorrow the human race would keep humming along (sure, there would be massive disruption, but we'd still be around). If humanity disappeared all that e-talk would, too. Efficiency is not the only yardstick.

Yes, planes fly faster and higher than birds, but require fossil fuels difficult to acquire whereas birds are powered by readily available organic materials.

Small planes can run on ethanol (cite). I'm not sure how much work it would take to modify a jet engine to run on ethanol, but I assume it could be done without too much difficulty, albeit with some loss of efficiency.

A LOT of loss of efficiency. Ethanol is not nearly as energy-dense as petroleum derived fuels. If you engineered a big airplane to run on ethanol you'd have to significantly increase the fuel carried to haul the same mass the same distance. That's why, instead of seeking alternative fuels, the makers of large airplanes have striven for more fuel efficiency by flying higher (less air resistance) or improving the engines.

Small airplanes have no problem running on ethanol. Small airplanes have run on steam, for goodness sake! (Well, OK, only that one, but it did work) If battery technology and solar power advance just a little further it will be possible to run small airplanes on those energy types, too. The thing is, they don't scale up. Size matters. Flying is energy-expensive, and energy density of fuels is a huge limiting factor in aviation. It's a limiting factor for flying animals, as well - the highest metabolic rates are found in flyers, and flying animals, be they mammals or avians, have a constant battle to stay fed. Insects have less of a problem with this because they're so small and carry so much less mass, but I'd be very surprised if flying insects didn't have significantly higher metabolic demands than non-flying insects.

It's weakly analogous to chemotrophic bacteria - yes, there are extremophiles out there that eat rock and don't require solar energy to survive. However, they don't do anything as fast as oxygen-powered organisms and, until very recently, multi-celluar non-oxygen using creatures were unkown. Those that have been found are very small, microscopic, and not terribly sophisticated. Sure, undersea vents have energetic multiceulluar life around them, but the big, fast-moving stuff is eating the chemotrophs and burning the organic fuel with oxygen. You can run small things on that fuel, but not large things (as far as we know). You can run small planes on ethanol, but, barring some breakthrough in technology, running something the size of a B-747 isn't practical. If we were limited to using ethanol I'd expect a comeback of dirigibles for large scale aviation as they only burn fuel to move, not to generate lift.

and come with a pretty useful AI and navigational "computer" on board, one that doesn't require calibration or a "constellation" of satellites to maintain, and birds can perform their own maintenance.

Most bird navigation systems suck compared to modern-day anything, even just a guy with a map. A guy with a map can find his way from one specific area of one specific city on one side of the US all the way to one specific area of one specific city on the other side, three thousand miles away.

Yeah, but homing pigeons know how to find their way as part of their normal operating system, humans have to be taught how to read a map. Helll, I know people who still manage to get lost using a GPS that tells you when to turn and how to tie your shoelaces.

Homing pigeons (as well as other birds) navigate without needing education in navigation. Migrating birds might need someone to lead the way the first time, but they remember routes better than humans do unless the humans have some means of recording their route (a few exceptional humans aside, but again, they've usually had education in navigation - birds don't need that).

Having both raised birds from infancy, and having earned a pilot's license, I can say birds are optimized to pick up on flying skills much more than humans are. Flying comes as part of a bird's basic "hardware" and "software". At three months of age birds have mastered flying concepts that take humans considerably longer to learn, if they can do it at all.

So bird navigation systems "suck" ONLY in comparison to the most recent navigational systems we have devised, and even then, education is required to use those fancy nav systems along with considerable infrastructure. Yes, I could make my own maps - down to making my own paper, my own pen, and my own ink to do it with - and birds can migrate thousands of miles only to return to the same nesting site year after year and don't require any external aids to do it.

Of course, this varies by species - a non-migrating species will not have evolved as sophisticated a nav system as a migrating species. Why would they? They have no incentive, no feedback making such a thing a reproductive advantage.

By why limit it to just birds, after all? How about the monarch butterfly, which every year engages in a multi-generational migration from a particular spot in Mexico up through the US into Canada and back again? Somehow, the route is programmed into the species. The butterflies that re-enter Mexico are 3-4 generations removed from those that left (with a few rare specimens perhaps making the entire journey, but nowhere near enough to provide guidance to the flock). That's pretty damn amazing.

There's a lot to get into with fish migrations and sea turtles, too. The point is, some animals do instinctively, or with minimal guidance, what takes humans significant technology and/or education to do. Sure, pre-literate humans have mastered long routes for trade but it takes years for a human to become sufficiently educated to act as a reliable guide on such journeys. Other species are either born with this (monarchs) or learn it much more rapidly (a whole bunch of other migrators).

Given that quite a few species have lifespans of decades they compare favorably in durability to man-made aircraft as well.

Plenty of aircraft from fifty years ago are still in use; how many birds have lifespans of > 50 years?

Larger parrots (macaws, African greys, cockcatoos, etc.) and raptors (hawks, eagles, some of the vultures). Corvids (crows, ravens, jays) and a lot of medium sized parrots can live into their 40's, There are more species of birds living 50 years than species of mammals doing so.

Of course, the more advanced ages are from birds in captivity. Why shouldn't we compare birds with the same access to a protected environment, food, and medical care to humans? "Wild" humans living with minimal tech and without medical care don't normally live as long as 50, either, although some birds do live that long in the wild, such as California Condors which have few predators once grown (pretty much humans and powerlines are threats, that's about it). Except, of course, there aren't any California Condors left in the wild last I heard. Long life span is no guarantee of species survival, after all.

Hey, while there are fifty year old airplanes still flying a lot of the individual airplanes from back then aren't any longer. The older the airplane model the more attrition of numbers. Just like individuals within a bird species.

For hunting rabbits, though, we haven't got anything that will beat a hawk.

We have shotguns, those seem to work pretty well. Heck, human spears are thought to have driven dozens of species extinct at the end of the last Ice Age.

Yes, but we didn't drive rabbits to extinction, did we?

Hawks evolved optimally to hunt small game in the rabbit size range. Sure, shotguns kill rabbits, but even with a scope a human can't spot a rabbit as far away as a hawk can. That is, after all, one of the reasons falconry developed - to utilize a hawk's ability to hunt for the benefit of humans (actually, the hawks benefit, too - that's why they stick around. A hawk teamed with a falconer has better hunting success AND, as a bonus, gets to eat on days the hunting is bad while a wild hawk goes to bed hungry. They figure that out pretty quick.)

I wasn't talking about hunting in general - humans are the only species that routinely hunts everything from mice to whales. We're amazing generalists. Hawks don't hunt whales, but damn they're good at catching rabbits! Better than we are, in that one slot, just as barn owls are far better mousers than we are. Humans specialize in being generalists. We do a little of everything to a certain level of competence, but we can't beat the specialist on their own territory.

For example, most animals that ambulate at all climb stairs far better than all than a very few, very specialized stair-climbing machines which, frankly, don't do anything much beyond stairclimbing whereas those animals not only go up and down stairs they do a lot of other things, too.

Point, although I think we'll soon (before 2020) have technology that can do that as well.

I'd like to see it. Personally, I'm skeptical, but maybe that's because I've been hearing walking robots (like flying cars) are just around the corner for about 30 years. Sure, I think it will happen. Eventually. We're certainly closer than we used to be.

Yes, there is inexpensive stuff on eBay. This is hardly proof of a post-scarcity society.

I wasn't trying to show that we were in a post-scarcity society. Heck, I essentially said the opposite, by saying that the reason we weren't in a post-scarcity society was largely political and not technological. I was just saying that we do, in fact, have a huge glut of stuff that we don't seem to want to use, which is what the section I quoted was discussing.

Well, OK, I see what you're saying there. However, any discussion of a minimal scarcity society (which is more realistic scenario than zero scarcity) is going to bump into the problem of energy. It takes energy to make stuff and move stuff around. That's physics.

And you're not taking into account psychological factors, either. People don't just want "enough", they want more stuff. Give 'em a house big enough to live comfortably most will want something even bigger. Give them a fast car they'll want still faster. Given them enough food and they'll start wanting to eat exotic stuff. No doubt these drives towards acquiring more and better resources were valuable during our evolutionary history. However, at this point, excess of these impulses threatens our quality of life. A minimal scarcity society not only requires abundant energy and resources, it also requires bringing the drive for more and more stuff under control. That's a human and a psychological factor, but it's no less real than developing more efficient shipping.

Now, I won't argue that even today's poor live like yesterday's kings, even better. Thanks to the Great Recession I'm definitely poor by today's measures, but I live in a secure building, with year round climate control, I have access to fresh food all year round, am in no danger of starving, and if I get sick or injured there are competent doctors around and I stand a very good chance of living into my 80's, even 90's, in relative good health. Progress has occurred. But mindless aquisition and the promotion of consumerism are problems every bit as much as the mountains of discarded but still usable items they generate.

And if you don't think houses aren't expensive, or aren't physical... I'm not sure what I can say to you.

Houses are still somewhat expensive, but I think that a majority of their price can be explained by the education guild, zoning laws, and various other political factors. Elizabeth Warren found (cite) that the largest single predictor of a home's price was the school district that it was located in. Essentially, by taking a monopoly on education and then making education depend on where you live, the government has hugely and artificially inflated home prices in large areas of the United States, particularly in suburbia.

Except the government doesn't have a monopoly on education, and never has. There have always been private schools in this country, and homeschooling (whether legal or not), and private as well as public libraries. It's too simplistic to blame it on the government or a "guild". Again, you're discounting the actions of individuals which, collectively, also affect the system. School systems are funded by property taxes, so where property such as houses are more valuable more money will be available to the schools, which usually (though not always) results in better schools which then attract more people who value education and are willing to pay for it, which results in better schools, and so on. Meanwhile, people who don't value education and don't want to pay for it gravitate towards other areas where the schools get less funding. People who can't afford to pay higher taxes are excluded from the better school districts NOT due to the machinations of the "education guild" but due to economic forces unrelated to or tangential to education. Then there are the wealthy who send their kids to private schools which are not dependent on geographical location for quality. That's entirely leaving aside the actions of real estate speculators who don't give a fuck about school districts but do have an interest in driving up prices by any means at hand.

You also suggest some sort of collusion to keep prices up, such as doctors conspiring to keep medical prices up.

Yes, I think this is fairly obvious. Why, for instance, have no new med schools been opened until very recently, despite the supply of pre-meds far exceeding demand? Only one new med school was opened from 1980 to 2000 (cite). It's largely because the AMA won't authorize them, because having a shortage of doctors ensures high prices. Classic guild/monopoly behavior.

High prices are NOT the sole motivating factor behind restricting the number of medical schools. After all, you don't just want lots of doctors, you want lots of GOOD doctors. It's not a matter of everyone who scores above, say, 98% on an exam gets to be a doctor, it's more a matter of wanting the cream of the available crop.

You are also discounting the very real material costs of medical education. You have to pay the teachers enough to make medical education attractive, otherwise you'll have a shortage of them as they go off to more profitable areas. The costs of such things as cadaver storage for gross anatomy, the cost of the hands-on training in clinical settings, and so forth are not the result of a cabal of old men cackling in the back rooms of the AMA offices. Hell, the AMA membership is dropping and has been for decades. Fewer than 20% of US physicians are members of the AMA right now, not to mention the competition represented by osteopathic doctors whose training costs are only marginally less expensive, at best, than those of MD's. I'm not saying the AMA has no effect - it certainly does - just that it is far too simplistic to say they're the bulk of the reason for high medical costs in the US. And they certainly can't account for rising medical costs in other countries. Everybody's medical costs are going up everywhere.

In fact, some of the best of modern medical technology is, in fact, expensive to produce purely due to the material costs and not because of collusion.

This is always true for the very latest technology, but medical costs for everything have been going way up, not just costs for the latest tech. A year or two back I had an ingrown toenail treated. How much technology does that require? We've been doing that the same way for fifty years. Yet it cost $300 (before insurance), for fifteen minutes' of a doctor's time. Here's a handy graph.

What would the cost of treating an ingrown toenail be in, say, Germany? Compare it to the cost of care in countries that have nationalized health care and only a marginal private health insurance industry and you'll see that our jacked up health care insurance "system" in the US is at least as much to blame as the AMA.

Again, it's not the the AMA has no effect, it's that it's too simplistic to blame it as the primary cause.

real estate values have, in fact, been falling in recent years which is hardly a sign of a conspiracy to artificially inflate prices.

I don't think so, it just means that the conspiracy stopped working so well. There's an EXPLICIT conspiracy by the US federal government to inflate home prices by providing subsidies to homeowners, in the form of tax deduction for mortgage interest, and more recently in the form of tax credits for buying a new home.

It's called "boom and bust". And, again, it wasn't just the government at work here, there was also a hefty involvement of private speculation. Look into past real estate boom-and-bust during the settlement of the west you'll see the same pattern. It doesn't require the government to generate such a bubble, and such bubbles always burst.

Funny, though - my state (Indiana) also provides a tax break for renters. Is that evidence of a government conspiracy to inflate the prices of rental units?'

The problem isn't support of homeowners, a lot of the problem was outright fraud that resulted in people who shouldn't have bought homes due to economic reasons getting in over their heads. The government didn't do that, private companies did that. Why don't you talk about the "guild" of mortgage providers who exploited those unsophisticated and uneducated in regards to real estate to extract their wealth?

On top of that, the idea that necessities could ever be free is ... bizarre.

Of course they wouldn't be free to produce. The idea is that they'd be cheap enough to be provided for free to everyone by government subsidy, without crushingly large costs. Heck, the ancient Romans did that by providing free grain to the urban poor. Panem et circenses.

Um... while the government is technically allowed to print all the money it wants to that's not actually how the world works... Stuff provided by government subsidy is not free. It is paid for by revenue such as taxes or fees levied on the population. Sure, in a sense if I am getting food stamps my food is "free" but somebody at some point has to pay for it. If I'm not getting food stamps some portion of my money, in the form of taxes, is paying for that program. (Actually, our modern food stamp program is far superior to the Romans doling out free grain. It's not perfect, but you can eat better on food stamps than the Roman poor did on their dole).

Now, personally, I'm aware that it's only a very small percentage of my tax money that goes towards that, and I think it's a worthwhile program to keep my impoverished neighbors fed because, first of all, I'm a compassionate human being (in addition to paying taxes I also donate still more money/resources to food charities) and second of all, keeping them well fed makes them far less likely to break into my home to steal my food as a survival measure, or start a violent revolution where I might be hurt or killed. Sort of a combination of charity and self-interest there. However, I'm not going to stand for you taking so much of my resources in the form of tax that I wind up less well off than that poor person over there living off the government dole.

Again, bread and circuses aren't free. Someone has to pay for them

I fail to see how you have to explain the internet as people standing in fields shouting at each other. How... bizarre. Really, where did you get this notion?

It's the closest thing I could think of that ancient Romans could visualize to our modern Internet, where information travels faster than people or horses can travel physically. You could also use chains of fire or smoke signals, etc.

Or polished metal mirrors. Or homing pigeons. Ancient civilizations have a many ways of communicating rapidly over distances. Work on that analogy, you can do better than people shouting in the fields.

You know, the internet is really quite new. I'm old enough to remember the days before satellite communications, before it was routine to see TV images from halfway around the world in real time, before direct-dial international phone calls were common and the postal system was still the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable means to communicate with another continent. If I wanted to talk to, say, Edi in Finland in 1979 we would have written letters to each other and waited days, if not weeks, for each "post" to appear as opposed to today when, in a thread on this forum, we can communicate as fast as we can type and hit "enter". I'm imagining trying to explain the internet or Facebook to myself in 1970, when most communications still had to physically travel from place to place. It's an interesting thought exercise.

See, that's a difference these days between someone who's 40 and someone who is 20 - those of us pushing a half century really are living in a world that, to our younger selves, is science fiction. But that also makes me skeptical of wild predictions and much of transhumanism. It's not that I don't believe in science or progress or improved technology - I do, I'm surrounded by it - it's that I'm well aware that we can't predict the future. In 1970 people probably would have predicted flying cars before routine organ transplants but that's not what happened. In 1970 sewing a severed limb back on was crazy talk, but today even the dumb-as-fuck rednecks who live down the road from me know that that if they slice a few digits or a hand off in their table saw to take the severed parts to the hospital with them. Oh, and we were going to have moon colonies and vacations in space by now, but I assure you in 1970 no one dreamed that even poor folks would routinely have a computer sitting not just in an entire room of their house but small enough to sit on a lap. Sure as hell such computing powerhouses wouldn't be used for games but for Mighty Science Things. Well, it didn't happen that way, did it?

I expect things will be quite different in even another 10 or 20 years... but in unexpected as well as expected ways. And the future will disappoint as much as it will amaze. This ties in with the point you made about technological progress not being exponential. The 19th-20th Century was a period of unusually rapid progress in many areas, but it's not the norm when one considers overall history, and there's no reason to think progress will continue indefinitely at the same pace going forward.

[Sarevok]

I think many people greatly underestimate robotics and embedded electronics. 30 years ago building a bot that could crawl through a room without hitting something was state of the art. Today it can be done for less than a hundred dollars. Embedded systems and robots are one hidden revolution of last 10 years. When people think of computers they think of PCs. The chips driving their DVD players, calculators, cellphones etc are obscure arcane stuff. Similarly the underlying electronic and mechanical parts of a robot are supposed to be super advanced. But the truth is this technology has become immensely accessible in the 2000s. Anybody with patience to learn could build a robot or make their cellphone run linux or android OS or make a game console like PSP (provided you have a team, a plan and plenty of time of course). I think this opening up of the arcane parts of the electronic industry to the public is going to have stunning impacts. Smaller companies and individuals can now create some very impressive projects without sacrificing a large part of their income. The power to create say a small guided missile is in anybodys hand today provided they have a genuine interest to learn. The projects one can see small groups building today are astounding. The tech that was the domain of military and corporations is now available to anyone,

Most futurists look out for AI, nanotech etc. I for one am eagerly anticipating many innovative smart devices, automation solutions and robots changing our lives one small step at a time.

[Akhlut]

A single living cell is more complicated than any modern computer.

I think this is simply factually incorrect. As of 2001 (now nine years obsolete), even if you just counted the software available on a typical Linux computer (not incuding hardware etc.), it added up to more than thirty million lines of source code. Assume, fairly generously, that each line of source code is equivalent to a single DNA base pair, even though a base pair is two bits of raw information, while a line of code is usually hundreds of bits. Even then, the computer's software is many times more complex than a bacterium, whose genomes tend to be around 1-10 million base pairs in size (cite). I really don't think this should be surprising; evolution is limited to adding a small number of bits per generation, and has an upper bound on total information content per organism (cite), while humans have neither of these limitations. I find it odd that we as a species continue to be in awe at the works of evolution, even though this past century has essentially consisted of humans finding ways to do things better than evolution can (radio and Internet are faster than sound for communication, planes fly faster than birds, machines can live in environments too extreme for any extremophile, computers can crunch numbers better than humans, etc.).

I think the issue is way too complex to simply say one is more complex than the other (though, I'm far more biased toward living creatures being a great deal more complex than technology).

Firstly, any living thing is going to be far, far, far more self-sufficient than any computer, robot, or other technological device. Every living thing can perform self-maintenance to an amazing degree, while we've yet to build a technological device that can self-repair broken structural components or self-adapt to computer viruses and destroy them.

Secondly, as Broomstick already mentioned, our innovations are only more efficient in a very narrow area of situations. A modern semi can haul thousands of pounds of material much more quickly than any horse, but it's hopelessly stuck in even moderately difficult off-road terrain. Trains are even more capable of hauling even larger amounts of materials, but they can't even cope with certain grades of slopes, much less move a centimeter if you took them off the rails. Similarly, while a computer is supremely good at computation, even modern facial recognition software can be thrown by goatees or scrunched up faces, which we can usually recognize quite easily. Computers have also been completely bested by things like language and vision.

And on it goes. For any one machine you find that can do something better than an already-existing organism, you can find that the organism can do hundreds, if not thousands, of other things infinitely better than the machine.

Plus, one has to consider the fact that different things are going to have different functions. A 747 is absolutely awesome at traveling large distances carrying hundreds of people and all their luggage, but it is absolutely abysmal at eating mosquitoes, unlike a purple martin (not to suggest that other organisms' existences need to be justified in terms of usefulness to humans).

[Sarevok]

Firstly, any living thing is going to be far, far, far more self-sufficient than any computer, robot, or other technological device. Every living thing can perform self-maintenance to an amazing degree, while we've yet to build a technological device that can self-repair broken structural components or self-adapt to computer viruses and destroy them.

On Earth perhaps where there is a whole eco system of support infrastructure for any living organism.

In space living beings lose their self sustained advantage entirely.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

That would be because the selective pressures for any creature that would want to survive in space are kind of harsh. "Can you survive constant exposure to cosmic radiation, without food and water for indeterminitably long periods, without any oxygen or gas of any sort ever, and in a brisk average temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin? In a vacuum? No? Tsk, sorry. You're dead."

[Akhlut]

Firstly, any living thing is going to be far, far, far more self-sufficient than any computer, robot, or other technological device. Every living thing can perform self-maintenance to an amazing degree, while we've yet to build a technological device that can self-repair broken structural components or self-adapt to computer viruses and destroy them.

On Earth perhaps where there is a whole eco system of support infrastructure for any living organism.

In space living beings lose their self sustained advantage entirely.

Plus, one has to consider the fact that different things are going to have different functions. A 747 is absolutely awesome at traveling large distances carrying hundreds of people and all their luggage, but it is absolutely abysmal at eating mosquitoes, unlike a purple martin (not to suggest that other organisms' existences need to be justified in terms of usefulness to humans).

So, robots are great for space travel. And? A deep-space probe is great at surviving vacuum, cosmic radiation, and extreme cold and that's good; it is a deep-space probe, though, not an organism, a microwave oven, or combine, though. All the features that make it a good deep-space probe make it terrible for pretty much anything else.

[Serafina]

That would be because the selective pressures for any creature that would want to survive in space are kind of harsh. "Can you survive constant exposure to cosmic radiation, without food and water for indeterminitably long periods, without any oxygen or gas of any sort ever, and in a brisk average temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin? In a vacuum? No? Tsk, sorry. You're dead."

You missed his point entirely. The reason why organism are not dependent on infrastructure is - well, most ARE dependent on infrastructure in form of our ecosystem. Sure, a factory needs electricity, a truck needs roads, a car needs fuel. But a tree also needs water, a fish needs a river (well, some) and ALL animals need an external food source and the right environment. That's quite comparable to infrastructure - without it, they don't work. That "infrastructure" just happens to already exist almost everywhere on our planet - and when the correct infrastructure is not there, those animals or plants are not there either.

Yes, biological organism have a clear advantage regarding infrastructure right now. But it's not an inherent advantage, just a matter of circumstances.


And animals are not necessarily as versatile as they appear to be. Most birds are terrible at catching flies. Fish can't survive outside the water (with a few exceptions). While it's true that organisms have a wider ranged of capabilities per organisms than machines, that's also a matter of necessity - they NEED to fulfill complex tasks(such as hunting) in order to survive.


Regarding self-repair: Only the most simple organisms are capable of that at a sufficient level - everything else dies of old age. They are not different from machines in that regard.

[Sarevok]

Yes that is exactly what I meant. Thank you for elaborating so eloquently Serafina.

[Akhlut]

You missed his point entirely. The reason why organism are not dependent on infrastructure is - well, most ARE dependent on infrastructure in form of our ecosystem. Sure, a factory needs electricity, a truck needs roads, a car needs fuel. But a tree also needs water, a fish needs a river (well, some) and ALL animals need an external food source and the right environment. That's quite comparable to infrastructure - without it, they don't work. That "infrastructure" just happens to already exist almost everywhere on our planet - and when the correct infrastructure is not there, those animals or plants are not there either.

Most animals are a lot more flexible in their choice of 'infrastructure' than any machine. A computer is dependent on an electrical grid in some fashion, whereas a great number of animals have much wider options available to them. Tigers, for instance, spread from tundra to deep jungles, subsisting on ungulates, other carnivores, reptiles, birds, and anything else that is made of meat and that they can kill. Cockroaches can live almost anywhere humans do, and can live on anything organic. Bacteria can live almost literally anywhere and survive on oxidizing metals deep within the earth. Most machines are highly limited in scope, and are always dependent upon humans for repair, fuel, and the like.

Plus, I never said organisms were entirely self-sufficient, I said they were more self-sufficient.

Yes, biological organism have a clear advantage regarding infrastructure right now. But it's not an inherent advantage, just a matter of circumstances.

I doubt we're going to see technology being more ubiquitous than living things and having the infrastructure to support it. While we are doing all we can to destroy most natural environments, we're doing that to mostly replace existing wild areas with agriculture, which introduce their own sort of ecology (far less biodiverse and mostly filled with organisms we consider pests, but still there).

And animals are not necessarily as versatile as they appear to be. Most birds are terrible at catching flies. Fish can't survive outside the water (with a few exceptions). While it's true that organisms have a wider ranged of capabilities per organisms than machines, that's also a matter of necessity - they NEED to fulfill complex tasks(such as hunting) in order to survive.

All organisms are miniature chemical plants, able to produce thousands of different organic compounds; all bilaterally symmetrical animals can independently grow limbs of near-equal length; all organisms can engage in complex communication with other organisms; etc.

Also, what does it matter why they are more complex? Hell, why does relative complexity between machines and organisms actually matter? I love space probes; I think knowledge about the greater universe is awesome and can only be helpful. I think robots are fucking wonderful, as people should not have to be yoked to hard, manual labor to build shit just to survive. But, why does it matter if my computer is more advanced than mold? I can't get penicillin from a CPU. A computer in and of itself does not make me appreciate the grandeur of life. It's a tool, merely an extension of us knapping flint a million years ago. A Cray supercomputer is one of the most advanced machines we have, but if I need to assemble a birdhouse, it is useless. It can't saw wood or hammer nails.

Regarding self-repair: Only the most simple organisms are capable of that at a sufficient level - everything else dies of old age. They are not different from machines in that regard.

If I break my arm, it will heal. If my car's tire blows out, it will never become whole again.

[Broomstick]

The reason why organism are not dependent on infrastructure is - well, most ARE dependent on infrastructure in form of our ecosystem. Sure, a factory needs electricity, a truck needs roads, a car needs fuel. But a tree also needs water, a fish needs a river (well, some) and ALL animals need an external food source and the right environment. That's quite comparable to infrastructure - without it, they don't work. That "infrastructure" just happens to already exist almost everywhere on our planet - and when the correct infrastructure is not there, those animals or plants are not there either.

Yes, biological organism have a clear advantage regarding infrastructure right now. But it's not an inherent advantage, just a matter of circumstances.

True, but the surface of planet Earth is where both we and (most) of our machines are. That's the context for all of this. In the global ecosystem organisms are more self-sufficient than machines. Well, gee, maybe it's because the organisms had a four billion year head start?

Given enough time circumstances might come about where, in a given context, machines are equally self-sufficient as organisms, a "technosystem" if you will, a mechanical counterpart to an ecosystem. It doesn't exist yet, though. I'm pretty sure it won't be here in the next year or the next decades, either.

And animals are not necessarily as versatile as they appear to be. Most birds are terrible at catching flies. Fish can't survive outside the water (with a few exceptions). While it's true that organisms have a wider ranged of capabilities per organisms than machines, that's also a matter of necessity - they NEED to fulfill complex tasks(such as hunting) in order to survive.

Animals are specialized to some degree for their environment. Yes, even us. As it happens, our environment requires us to do many things, not just one. Thus, while no animal can equal a highly specialized machine for a task, none of those machines match an animal versatility in general. I think we're all on board with that, right?

Regarding self-repair: Only the most simple organisms are capable of that at a sufficient level - everything else dies of old age. They are not different from machines in that regard.

And all machines degrade with time as well. Not only do the mechanical and chemical properties of materials change when exposed to things like sunlight, water, and temperature extremes as well as the stress of being used, but just sitting in a cool, dark, room materials can continue to degrade with the passage of just time and nothing else. "Old age" does not mean self-repair is non-existent. Given that many of the cells in a human body only live a few weeks there is actually a LOT of repair and replacement going on continuously. Given that your red blood cells die off and are destroyed within a month, as is the lining of your intestines that enable you to absorb food, and your skin cells are continuously wearing away (again, it takes about a month for your skin to renew itself) how can you claim self-maintenance doesn't occur?

And if you break a leg the bone will (given a chance) heal. If you cut yourself your skin will heal. Hey if I scratch the paint on my car or break an axle neither of those will heal up on their own, I have go to the effort of replacing them. The self-repair of organic life isn't perfect but it most certainly does exist. Name one machine that can maintain itself at all without the assistance of human beings. Yet even the lowest life forms have some self-repair capacity, and actually some of the more "primitive" ones are, as you noted, better at it than the more complicated life forms.

[Broomstick]

I think one of the major differences between living things and machines is the flexibility of organisms.

For example, let's say I have a car. It's primary use is as transportation. Now, it could be adapted to use as a shelter, but it's not a very good use of it, and even a small shed would have superior headroom and possibly better insulation. It would have some use for storage. Beyond that, there's not much use for it. You can't use it to construct a building, grow or process food (except through the most contrived means), impart knowledge, or do other things we find useful.

Contrast this with my pet conure. Now, conures don't need people. In fact, they were around millions of years before H. sapiens came on the scene, and have only been sharing space with humans for about 12,000 years. A blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. Griffin - the specific conure in question - evolved to hunt seeds, nuts, and small insects as well as sampling some other types of vegetation, such as new world peppers (in fact, they don't perceive "hot" peppers as hot at all, they don't react to capsaicin as mammals do). She is also adapted to fly in forests and woodlands and communicate vocally and non-verbally with other birds of her species.

Despite all that, she flies ably and nimbly in a human apartment, communicates with the strange pink apes in her environment even to the point of learning their names and short sentences (she's up to three words at a time), and has not only learned to eat human foods but even to use utensils (she will use a fragment of a chip or cracker to dip up foods like hummus, sour cream, or peanut butter). Instead of hunting food she's learned to ask the humans to refill the food and water bowls. Um... nothing in her species history was evolving towards that environment, yet she does quite well in it. In fact, despite the alien circumstances, her life expectancy is greater living with humans than living in the wild in the environment she's evolutionarily adapted to. (What's really cute are her attempts to communicate with the microwave oven. She knows yummy food comes out of it. She imitates its beeps extremely well. She is continually disappointed it won't talk back to her or fulfill her requests for hot meals.)

See, that's a major difference between machines and animals. Animals are more adaptable as individuals to changed circumstances. Coyotes don't encounter stairs in their natural environment, but urban coyotes don't have a problem negotiating them. Cars are "adapted" (designed, actually) to drive on roads or at least flat surfaces - they don't do stairs at all well. Hammers don't make good screwdrivers, but my bird's beak, designed to break open seeds, can also unscrew things as well (and this can be very annoying). People never evolved wings - no, we built airplanes. And didn't need an outside agency to prompt us to do that.

Arguably, our most flexible machines right now are our computers. The one I'm using now can do math, communicate around the world (as it is right now), entertain me, and, to a very limited extent, diagnose problems if I "ask" it what is wrong (good old virus scan, you know?). But it can't bake a cake. It can remember the cake recipe for me, act as a cooking timer to remind me to take the cake out of the oven, but it can't bake a cake. I suppose I could engineer something so, given the proper set up, it could mix and bake a cake (hey, that's the idea behind bread machines, really), but it can't drive itself to the store to get ingredients. And it won't invent a new recipe on its own. And even if I did wire it into a mixer and a stove it would still be limited to those particular tools - me, I've baked cakes in campfires as well as gas and electric ovens. If you change my tools I can adapt pretty quickly, machines not so much. Yes, you can reprogram a machine, but the machine sitting in front of me can't reprogram itself. I, on the other hand, can teach myself new things. So, for that matter, can my conure.

The point is, even our most flexible machines are still very limited in their flexibility. If my conure can't get food in the kitchen in her food bowl she'll go looking in the bedroom or bathroom (mm - spiders!). If the electrical plug for my computer stops working, though, the computer won't seek another one on its own. If my conure can't find jalepenos to eat she'll look for corn, but if my computer can't get AC power at 110 volts it won't be satisfied with DC at 220 volts.

There's that concept of a Turing test for a computer, the idea that a computer that can pass the test can carry on a conversation so well that it could pass for human. Well, in a limited area of knowledge there are some computers that could probably do that... as long as you stay within those limits. Get outside them, though... Maybe we need to expand the idea beyond conversation, come up with a Turing test for being able to move around an environment, to manipulate an environment, to adapt to an environment. We can build a machine to pass a certain arbitrary test, but that machine won't do well in other areas with other criteria, if it can even function at all. It's very different from the conure sitting on my arm right now (who has mastered the concept of jumping up and down on the keyboard to get either some new effect on the monitor screen or some sort of reaction from the human involved) who can pass "tests" her species never evolved to take on, such as communicating with hominids and opening a box of cereal on her own.

[apsec112]

@Broomstick: I acknowledge your reply, but I think we've gone too far off topic at this point, so I'll only reply to a few of your points.

Except genes are not read as books are read. Again, I am not an expert in this area and I wish one of our more knowledgeable people would speak up, but genes have start and stop codes, information that starts at one point may be interupted and resume elsewhere with "junk" in the middle, and so forth so that doubling chromosomes can have much greater effect than you'd expect from mere duplication.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the amount of information contained in the genes, which is what I was talking about originally. If you have a book, and create another copy of the book and stick it to the first, it doesn't matter how much you slice and dice and scramble the pages- you're not adding any new information that wasn't there before.

However, any discussion of a minimal scarcity society (which is more realistic scenario than zero scarcity) is going to bump into the problem of energy. It takes energy to make stuff and move stuff around. That's physics.

Of course, but we can easily use nuclear power to cover all of our basic energy needs if we have the political will. A post-scarcity society doesn't mean that everyone has access to literally infinite amounts of energy, it just means that energy is sufficiently abundant such that everyone's needs can be easily fulfilled.

Again, bread and circuses aren't free. Someone has to pay for them

Of course, but the point is that, in a post-scarcity society, we can pay for all of that stuff easily, without creating a large tax burden. We could actually pay for a Roman-style dole right now without creating a large tax burden. Two pounds of wheat per person per day would cost around ninety dollars per person per year, or $27 billion a year, which is only 0.2% of our GDP.

For everyone else's posts:

I think the issue is way too complex to simply say one is more complex than the other (though, I'm far more biased toward living creatures being a great deal more complex than technology).

How can you say that you simply can't compare the two, and then make a comparison claim in the very same sentence? That doesn't make any sense.

Every living thing can perform self-maintenance to an amazing degree, while we've yet to build a technological device that can self-repair broken structural components or self-adapt to computer viruses and destroy them.

Living things can't just magically repair broken parts or adapt to viruses either. Before modern medicine, any serious injury or serious disease was likely to result in death. Animals, like computers, have limited self-repair abilities, but these abilities are limited, they can't fix everything or fix most serious problems.

A modern semi can haul thousands of pounds of material much more quickly than any horse, but it's hopelessly stuck in even moderately difficult off-road terrain.

Which is why the militaries of the world all still use horses for carrying goods across rough terrain... oh wait. Machines, just like living creatures, are built for their environments, and fail once taken out of those environments. Pointing out that a semi can't go off-road is no more useful than saying that fig wasps will go extinct without fig trees, or that lions can't survive in the Arctic.

Similarly, while a computer is supremely good at computation, even modern facial recognition software can be thrown by goatees or scrunched up faces, which we can usually recognize quite easily.

http://us.toshiba.com/computers/researc ... ecognition

Computers have also been completely bested by things like language and vision.

For any one machine you find that can do something better than an already-existing organism, you can find that the organism can do hundreds, if not thousands, of other things infinitely better than the machine.

(citation needed)

A 747 is absolutely awesome at traveling large distances carrying hundreds of people and all their luggage, but it is absolutely abysmal at eating mosquitoes, unlike a purple martin (not to suggest that other organisms' existences need to be justified in terms of usefulness to humans).

Humans, if we wanted to, could drive mosquitoes extinct, which no other organism has been able to do for hundreds of millions of years. See the Nature article A World Without Mosquitoes.

Can you survive constant exposure to cosmic radiation, without food and water for indeterminitably long periods, without any oxygen or gas of any sort ever, and in a brisk average temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin? In a vacuum? No? Tsk, sorry. You're dead.

But machines can.

If I break my arm, it will heal. If my car's tire blows out, it will never become whole again.

Only because a). we're bipedal, which is very rare in the animal kingdom, so you don't have to constantly put stress on the limb in order to get food, and b). because we know how to repair broken arms with modern medicine. For most animals, if they break a limb they're just screwed. See eg. Ruffian.

All organisms are miniature chemical plants, able to produce thousands of different organic compounds; all bilaterally symmetrical animals can independently grow limbs of near-equal length; all organisms can engage in complex communication with other organisms; etc.

You could just as easily say that all modern computers can produce thousands (in fact, millions) of different kinds of information, and can engage in complex communication with other computers. In fact, the communication that computers engage in is more complex than that of just about any organism. How much complex communication do amoebae engage in?

A computer in and of itself does not make me appreciate the grandeur of life.

This is the general attitude that I'm trying to fight against by making all these points- mindless worship of nature, and a corresponding view of anything artificial as inferior. Why isn't a modern computer just as grand as a bird?

It's a tool, merely an extension of us knapping flint a million years ago.

Every feature of every living creature in the world is just a tool that genes use to reproduce themselves more efficiently. See The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Most animals are a lot more flexible in their choice of 'infrastructure' than any machine.

(citation needed)

Tigers, for instance, spread from tundra to deep jungles, subsisting on ungulates, other carnivores, reptiles, birds, and anything else that is made of meat and that they can kill.

You're lumping all "tigers" together in a single category, and then acting as if there's some single organism that can do anything that each one of the eight different subspecies of tiger can do. By analogy, I should get to lump all "robots" together, and then act as if there's a single machine that can walk, climb stairs, recognize faces, converse in English, have facial expressions and other non-verbal communication, go eight miles underwater, and into outer space, etc. etc., since we have individual robots that can do each one of those things.

Cockroaches can live almost anywhere humans do, and can live on anything organic.

See above. Also, citation needed for living on "anything organic". There's a VERY wide range of organic chemicals and a great many are toxic to all cells, like cyanide.

Bacteria can live almost literally anywhere and survive on oxidizing metals deep within the earth.

See above.

Thus, while no animal can equal a highly specialized machine for a task, none of those machines match an animal versatility in general.

(citation needed)

Given that your red blood cells die off and are destroyed within a month, as is the lining of your intestines that enable you to absorb food, and your skin cells are continuously wearing away (again, it takes about a month for your skin to renew itself) how can you claim self-maintenance doesn't occur?

The point isn't that self-maintenance doesn't occur, but that (just like for computers) it's limited; it can't do everything and the organism will eventually break down.

Name one machine that can maintain itself at all without the assistance of human beings.

Any modern computer does a huge amount of automatically managing itself, working around bugs, exception handling and so forth. You don't see all of this happening, but that doesn't mean it isn't real, any more than the internal operations and management of your body isn't real because you can't see it.

[apsec112]

Despite all that, she flies ably and nimbly in a human apartment, communicates with the strange pink apes in her environment even to the point of learning their names and short sentences (she's up to three words at a time), and has not only learned to eat human foods but even to use utensils (she will use a fragment of a chip or cracker to dip up foods like hummus, sour cream, or peanut butter). Instead of hunting food she's learned to ask the humans to refill the food and water bowls. Um... nothing in her species history was evolving towards that environment, yet she does quite well in it.

Of course, because the organisms that we keep as pets are precisely those ones that can adapt most easily to human environments. We don't keep hippopotami or duck-billed platypi around as pets for a reason.

Coyotes don't encounter stairs in their natural environment, but urban coyotes don't have a problem negotiating them.

Again, there's a selection effect here, because coyotes are among the very few species that can survive well in urban environments. There are a zillion species that can't climb stairs, or indeed survive in cities at all, but (surprise!) we don't see those animals in cities.

If you change my tools I can adapt pretty quickly, machines not so much. Yes, you can reprogram a machine, but the machine sitting in front of me can't reprogram itself. I, on the other hand, can teach myself new things.

Of course. That's the power of intelligence, and it's why strong artificial intelligence is such a powerful technology. Humans can do all those things, not because they're biological, but because they have general intelligence; most animals can't do any of the things you listed either. From The Power of Intelligence:

In our skulls we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn’t think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe. If you’d never seen an anatomy textbook, and you saw a brain lying in the street, you’d say “Yuck!” and try not to get any of it on your shoes. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ that cooled the blood. It doesn’t look dangerous.

Five million years ago, the ancestors of lions ruled the day, the ancestors of wolves roamed the night. The ruling predators were armed with teeth and claws – sharp, hard cutting edges, backed up by powerful muscles. Their prey, in self-defense, evolved armored shells, sharp horns, poisonous venoms, camouflage. The war had gone on through hundreds of eons and countless arms races. Many a loser had been removed from the game, but there was no sign of a winner. Where one species had shells, another species would evolve to crack them; where one species became poisonous, another would evolve to tolerate the poison. Each species had its private niche – for who could live in the seas and the skies and the land at once? There was no ultimate weapon and no ultimate defense and no reason to believe any such thing was possible.

Then came the Day of the Squishy Things.

They had no armor. They had no claws. They had no venoms.

If you saw a movie of a nuclear explosion going off, and you were told an Earthly life form had done it, you would never in your wildest dreams imagine that the Squishy Things could be responsible. After all, Squishy Things aren’t radioactive.

In the beginning, the Squishy Things had no fighter jets, no machine guns, no rifles, no swords. No bronze, no iron. No hammers, no anvils, no tongs, no smithies, no mines. All the Squishy Things had were squishy fingers – too weak to break a tree, let alone a mountain. Clearly not dangerous. To cut stone you would need steel, and the Squishy Things couldn’t excrete steel. In the environment there were no steel blades for Squishy fingers to pick up. Their bodies could not generate temperatures anywhere near hot enough to melt metal. The whole scenario was obviously absurd.

And as for the Squishy Things manipulating DNA – that would have been beyond ridiculous. Squishy fingers are not that small. There is no access to DNA from the Squishy level; it would be like trying to pick up a hydrogen atom. Oh, technically it’s all one universe, technically the Squishy Things and DNA are part of the same world, the same unified laws of physics, the same great web of causality. But let’s be realistic: you can’t get there from here.

Even if Squishy Things could someday evolve to do any of those feats, it would take thousands of millennia. We have watched the ebb and flow of Life through the eons, and let us tell you, a year is not even a single clock tick of evolutionary time. Oh, sure, technically a year is six hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion Planck intervals. But nothing ever happens in less than six hundred million trillion trillion trillion trillion Planck intervals, so it’s a moot point. The Squishy Things, as they run across the savanna now, will not fly across continents for at least another ten million years; no one could have that much sex.

Now explain to me again why an Artificial Intelligence can’t do anything interesting over the Internet unless a human programmer builds it a robot body.

[Akhlut]

Speaking of learning new information and doing new things with it: most machines aren't very good at that. In fact, only a very small minority of machines specifically designed to do that are capable of it, whereas even the most basic of cells can exhibit such stimulus-response actions.

[Broomstick]

@Broomstick: I acknowledge your reply, but I think we've gone too far off topic at this point, so I'll only reply to a few of your points.

Well, that is another feature of intelligent lifeforms, isn't it? We wander off topic.

Except genes are not read as books are read. Again, I am not an expert in this area and I wish one of our more knowledgeable people would speak up, but genes have start and stop codes, information that starts at one point may be interupted and resume elsewhere with "junk" in the middle, and so forth so that doubling chromosomes can have much greater effect than you'd expect from mere duplication.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the amount of information contained in the genes, which is what I was talking about originally. If you have a book, and create another copy of the book and stick it to the first, it doesn't matter how much you slice and dice and scramble the pages- you're not adding any new information that wasn't there before.

Another interesting thing about genes is that a lot of them seem to be "junk" and serve no purpose whatsoever. It's like a book with 1/3 (or more) of its pages blank or filled with gibberish. Right now, our science tells us that there are only about 25,000 genes in the human genome (it may actually be less than that). If a gene is equivalent to a line of computer code (which is pretty generous) then, in theory, you only need about 25,000 lines of code to make something as complex as a human being. Maybe it would be better to view chromosomes as zip files, where the information is very compressed and can be "extracted" into something larger. If that's the case, then there might be ways that even if only a gene or two were added the result if effectively much more information than would be expected.

As I said, though, this is not my area of expertise. I certainly could be wrong on that.

However, any discussion of a minimal scarcity society (which is more realistic scenario than zero scarcity) is going to bump into the problem of energy. It takes energy to make stuff and move stuff around. That's physics.

Of course, but we can easily use nuclear power to cover all of our basic energy needs if we have the political will. A post-scarcity society doesn't mean that everyone has access to literally infinite amounts of energy, it just means that energy is sufficiently abundant such that everyone's needs can be easily fulfilled.

Well, "easy" in one sense, but while I can utilize fire wood in my own home needing only simple tools present from the stone age for my personal energy needs (on a survival level, obviously, not one providing luxuries like the internet) I couldn't possibly build a nuclear reactor, let alone a safe one. A well organized, technology advanced society can, in theory, use nuclear energy for many energy needs... but not necessarially all of them.

Here's the deal: nuclear power requires not only that you have a manfacturing base that allows for mining and refinement of nuclear fuels, but also one enabling you to build the powerplants with enough safeguards in place that you don't have Chernobyls happening every other week. Yes, clearly, human error was heavily involved in Chernobyl but humans are something in the machine's environment and you have to engineer in a manner taking them into account. You need more than just poltical will, you need the technological know-how to do it as well. You need all parts of the structure, not just some.

That means that while some humans could live in a nuclear powered society not all of them will. Of course, there's nothing obligating the haves to share with the have nots other than compassion or a system of ethics that requires it - neither of which are universal human traits.

The other factor is that while nuclear power is great for stationary users like buildings it's not so great for mobile applications like transportation. Yes, you can have electric trains where the electricity is generated by nuclear power but you'll need something that doesn't connect to the grid to build the infrastructure supporting electric trains in the first place. And I just don't see building an extension cord long enough to make an electrical jet practical, do you? OK, OK, we'll use the nuke plants as a source of energy to produce synthetic fuels, but my point is that nuclear power won't fill all our needs.

Again, bread and circuses aren't free. Someone has to pay for them

Of course, but the point is that, in a post-scarcity society, we can pay for all of that stuff easily, without creating a large tax burden. We could actually pay for a Roman-style dole right now without creating a large tax burden. Two pounds of wheat per person per day would cost around ninety dollars per person per year, or $27 billion a year, which is only 0.2% of our GDP.

God, I hate the term "post-scarcity". It's awful precisely because it carries an implication of a free lunch, which is bullshit. That's why I say "minimal scarcity" because you'll always have some sort of limiting factor at work, some things will always be less common or scarce compared to others. I think it's more accurate.

Fact is, our current food dole is actually around $30 billion a year, and as I pointed out, provides a potentially much better diet than the Roman two pounds of wheat per day per person. So really, we're already doing that to a large degree. It's pretty fucking hard to actually starve to death in the US these days, it's limited mostly to anorexics who starve due to mental problems, not lack of access to food. As I said, progress has occured. We're much better at feeding the poor than the Romans were.

Every living thing can perform self-maintenance to an amazing degree, while we've yet to build a technological device that can self-repair broken structural components or self-adapt to computer viruses and destroy them.

Living things can't just magically repair broken parts or adapt to viruses either. Before modern medicine, any serious injury or serious disease was likely to result in death. Animals, like computers, have limited self-repair abilities, but these abilities are limited, they can't fix everything or fix most serious problems.

Define "serious". We have archaeological evidence of people survive terribly injuries in past, not just broken bones but head injuries and missing limbs that show evidence of healing at work years after the initial injury. While not everyone survived, people have recovered from serious illnesses like malaria or smallpox without medical intervention. Wild animals can be found that survive limb amputations or sensory injuries to ears, ears, and what not for years. Some lizards and amphibians can regrow tails or digits. Cephalapods, starfish, and crustaceans regrow entire limbs. Not every injury is survivable, and not every individual will survive, but some do.

So, please, define serious before we start debating whether or not a given species can survive a particular injury.

A 747 is absolutely awesome at traveling large distances carrying hundreds of people and all their luggage, but it is absolutely abysmal at eating mosquitoes, unlike a purple martin (not to suggest that other organisms' existences need to be justified in terms of usefulness to humans).

Humans, if we wanted to, could drive mosquitoes extinct, which no other organism has been able to do for hundreds of millions of years. See the Nature article A World Without Mosquitoes.

Actually, that article states that we can't wipe out mosquitoes because our mosquito-killing ability at present is not effecient enough. Whether or not we'll get better at killing them in the future is in question, so no, we can't in fact render mosquitoes extinct. More's the pity in my view, except for the ethical problem of delibrately causing an extinction. Hell, we haven't summoned the resolve to finally obliterate smallpox which, in fact, we CAN do right now!

Can you survive constant exposure to cosmic radiation, without food and water for indeterminitably long periods, without any oxygen or gas of any sort ever, and in a brisk average temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin? In a vacuum? No? Tsk, sorry. You're dead.

But machines can.

But not indefinitely - eventually the cosmic radiation will trash deep space probes, along with micrometorites.

If I break my arm, it will heal. If my car's tire blows out, it will never become whole again.

Only because a). we're bipedal, which is very rare in the animal kingdom, so you don't have to constantly put stress on the limb in order to get food, and b). because we know how to repair broken arms with modern medicine. For most animals, if they break a limb they're just screwed. See eg. Ruffian.

Poor example, as horses are not "most animals" and can only represent a subset. Dogs and cats with injured limbs, even missing limbs, have been know to survive in the wild. Ditto for many primates, rodents, lizards... Birds, on the other hand, despite being bipedal, don't do well with broken limbes, even their less specialized ones such as legs. Broken wings in the wild are almost always fatal.

This is the general attitude that I'm trying to fight against by making all these points- mindless worship of nature, and a corresponding view of anything artificial as inferior. Why isn't a modern computer just as grand as a bird?

My "worship" of nature isn't mindless but based on a knowledge that a lot of this stuff just happened without intelligence directing anything. I get pretty amazed by things like stars and susnets, too, and awsome forces of nature on display. That doesn't mean I view the artifical as "less", it's just that I appreciate it in other ways and don't automatically accept artifical as somehow inherently better.

Seriously, why do we still grow plants on farms for food? Maybe because we don't have a practical way to synthesize a human diet. NASA did do experiments on completely artifical foods a couple decades ago, but aside from being difficult and energy-intensive to make, no one would eat the damn stuff. Granted, that's in part because we evolved to like the edible bits of plants and animals but, again, that is what we have to deal with. So growing wheat in a field is much easier, more practical, and cheaper than either attempting to synthesize a completely artificial wheat substitute or altering the human race to like the synthetics we can produce at this time.

So, if you offer me an entirely synthetic apple I'm going to be pretty damn skeptical and yeah, I like the naturally evolved, imperfect organic apple much better. On the other hand, if I get cancer give me all that artifical techno stuff like surgery with anesthesia and chemotherapy drugs and painkillers and all that other shit because it's a damn sight better than going all natural in that that scenario.

Nature is amazing because, despite being the outcome of non-intelligence, it works so damn well so often. Technology is amazing because it can sometimes fix the problem when nature goes off the rails. I don't view one as superior, but rather (ideally) they complement one another.

See above. Also, citation needed for living on "anything organic". There's a VERY wide range of organic chemicals and a great many are toxic to all cells, like cyanide.

Incorrect. Cyanide is toxic largely due to its effect on the mitochondria, more specifically the enzyme cytochrome c in the mitochondiria. Living cells that don't use mitochondria, or who have an alternative metabolic pathway, do not find cyanide toxic. Plants, for example, don't mind cyanide very much and in fact use it as a defense against animals.

I am, of course, assuming you mean something like hydrogen cyandie or potassium cyanide - there are cyanide compounds (such as Prussian blue, Fe7(CN)18-14H2O, for example) that are actually an antidote for certain types of poisons such as thallium and cesium. Cyanide is also part of the chemical make up of certain pharmaceuticals, but I assumed you meant cyanide compounds that hurt rather than help living organisms.

Given that your red blood cells die off and are destroyed within a month, as is the lining of your intestines that enable you to absorb food, and your skin cells are continuously wearing away (again, it takes about a month for your skin to renew itself) how can you claim self-maintenance doesn't occur?

The point isn't that self-maintenance doesn't occur, but that (just like for computers) it's limited; it can't do everything and the organism will eventually break down.

Well, it seems we both agree that while self-maintenance can occur it's not infinitely powerful. Is everyone on board with that concept now?

Despite all that, she flies ably and nimbly in a human apartment, communicates with the strange pink apes in her environment even to the point of learning their names and short sentences (she's up to three words at a time), and has not only learned to eat human foods but even to use utensils (she will use a fragment of a chip or cracker to dip up foods like hummus, sour cream, or peanut butter). Instead of hunting food she's learned to ask the humans to refill the food and water bowls. Um... nothing in her species history was evolving towards that environment, yet she does quite well in it.

Of course, because the organisms that we keep as pets are precisely those ones that can adapt most easily to human environments. We don't keep hippopotami or duck-billed platypi around as pets for a reason.

Hippos are a problem not just due to adaptability or lack thereof but also size and food requirements. Large animals aren't kept as pets as often as small ones for very practical reasons outside of adaptability.

And we do keep things like pet fish which aren't well adapted to human environments (we basically have to build them a minature ecosystem and then maintain it, unless you're talking about something like an outside koi pond).

My point is that the flexibility that makes a conure a good pet is NOT bred into her, there' s nothing in her environment selecting for being a good pet. The traits that make her suitable as a pet evolved for entirely different reasons. It's as if someone disovered Toyota sedans, entirely without being designed for it, were not only good at being autombobiles but could also dance on Broadway. Yes, I can use a credit card to open a locked door in some instances, but in no way were they designed to do that, but it's still sort of amazing the first time you see it done.

Coyotes don't encounter stairs in their natural environment, but urban coyotes don't have a problem negotiating them.

Again, there's a selection effect here, because coyotes are among the very few species that can survive well in urban environments. There are a zillion species that can't climb stairs, or indeed survive in cities at all, but (surprise!) we don't see those animals in cities.

And then we have goats, which I presume, based upon their ability to climb trees and other obstacles, could manage stairs just fine but we don't see them running wild in cities like we do coyotes. Clearly, success in an urban environment depends upon more than just stair-climbing ability. Don't confuse an example for an exlusion. Hawks don't live in cities because they're somehow adapted to skyscrapers, they live in cities because pigeons live in cities and hawks like to eat pigeons.

If you change my tools I can adapt pretty quickly, machines not so much. Yes, you can reprogram a machine, but the machine sitting in front of me can't reprogram itself. I, on the other hand, can teach myself new things.

Of course. That's the power of intelligence, and it's why strong artificial intelligence is such a powerful technology. Humans can do all those things, not because they're biological, but because they have general intelligence; most animals can't do any of the things you listed either.

Artificial intelligence is a technology that does not exist yet. We have some programs such as Deep Blue that are very robust problem solvers in a specific areas but Deep Blue isn't intelligent no matter how well it plays chess. Most animals higher animals, do, in fact, have more capability of learning than Deep Blue does. Freakin' rats can learn things in a way computers can't. Will computers eventually gain the ability to learn? Maybe. But it's not happening in the near future as far as I can see.

In the beginning, the Squishy Things had no fighter jets, no machine guns, no rifles, no swords. No bronze, no iron. No hammers, no anvils, no tongs, no smithies, no mines. All the Squishy Things had were squishy fingers – too weak to break a tree, let alone a mountain. Clearly not dangerous. To cut stone you would need steel, and the Squishy Things couldn’t excrete steel. In the environment there were no steel blades for Squishy fingers to pick up.

It's cute, but it's wrong. You don't need steel to cut stone, as the Ancient Egyptian's artificats prove. You know those big stone buildings they made? The really old ones? No steel or iron used. Seriously. They went through a LOT of copper chisels and used some interesting thermal techniques to split stone. Before that, you have a couple million years of hominds using rocks to shape other rocks into useful forms, not even metal required. That's the problem with these "just so" stories, the authors are frequently fucking up by not doing basic research for 10 minutes on Google.

I could throw in here about meteorite iron, which was utilized by some ancient folks who were otherwise without steel, but I'll skip that.

And as for the Squishy Things manipulating DNA – that would have been beyond ridiculous. Squishy fingers are not that small. There is no access to DNA from the Squishy level; it would be like trying to pick up a hydrogen atom.

You don't need to pick up DNA to manipulate it - there's this technique called "selectrive breeding" or "artifical selection", which is how Native American got Zea mays from Zea diploperennis, Zea perennis, Zea luxurians, and/or Zea nicaraguensis. Which is a damn fine feat of genetic engineering if they didn't call it that and didn't use microscopes or petri dishes.

Now explain to me again why an Artificial Intelligence can’t do anything interesting over the Internet unless a human programmer builds it a robot body.

Hey, nobody here said that. Well, OK, I did say that artificial intelligence doesn't exist yet unless you define "intelligence" in a very narrow and highly specific manner so as to stretch the definition over what we're currently capable of producing. Actually, if you're building an intelligence to process data or store information or solve equantion it may not need a robot body - heck, Stephen Hawking seems to get by with a body that does little more than provide life support to his brain - but for some actions in the world you do need a body.

So... define what you want artificial intelligence to be and to do. THAT tells you if a body is necessary or not. If you're looking for something to store, index, and retrieve information that's one thing. If you're trying to develop a system that can drive a car in the real world that's a different set of problems.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Seeing as this thread started with him commenting on my posts...

This is certainly a valid point about creating intelligent dolphins, chimps, etc. being difficult, but it says little about whether it is possible, or even how long it would take. History shows that, although there is obviously some correlation between technological difficulty and development time, it does sometimes happen that very complex things are done more quickly than very simple things. For instance, it has taken us less than forty years to build up the entire stack of microprocessors -> personal computers -> Internet -> World Wide Web -> Web applications that allows us to use Facebook.

That is not complicated considering we are the ones who wrote/engineered everything that allowed us to do those things. There is a big difference between engineering something like that, and engineering development of an organism. We could do it from scratch, building an entire genome, before we couple play with the regulatory network of something already extant. The reason is that evolution did not actually engineer anything. It fucking jury rigged everything.

Yet, some very simple technologies, like processing coal into oil and the electric car, remain un-developed since they were invented in the early 20th century. Complexity does not imply that building something will take centuries.

Considering the fact that we know maybe 1% of what we would need to know to even try, yes. Yes it does.

I think this is simply factually incorrect. As of 2001 (now nine years obsolete), even if you just counted the software available on a typical Linux computer (not incuding hardware etc.), it added up to more than thirty million lines of source code. Assume, fairly generously, that each line of source code is equivalent to a single DNA base pair,

It is not.

even though a base pair is two bits of raw information, while a line of code is usually hundreds of bits. Even then, the computer's software is many times more complex than a bacterium, whose genomes tend to be around 1-10 million base pairs in size (cite).

It is not the base pair that matters. It is not the genes that matter. It is the number of genes, the regulation, and intra-cell signaling. Each gene will code for many different protein variants, because of differential splicing and three different open reading frames. You have inhibitory, and activating, positive and negative feedback loops in regulation, and the activity of each gene is regulated by gene products from across the rest of the organisms' genome and can have any number of those mechanisms in both up and downstream regulatory regions. Each signal transduction pathway will also have multiple effects on multiple genes. To say nothing of the cell processing signals from the environment outside the cell. You simply do not know what you are talking about.

As for evolution only adding a small number of bits per generation, that is patently false. Speciation often happens because of whole genome duplication, and most major advances in an organism's functioning are the result of gene duplication and subsequent point mutations, not just point mutations.

Just doubling the number of chromosomes doesn't increase the amount of information, because the new chromosomes are just exact copies of the old chromosomes.

No, it creates new information. It is just not novel information. There is a difference.

However mutation drift and positive selection can then run rampant on those extra chromosomes, rapidly creating new information. Without that duplication, you would not see the variety of life we currently have.

The act of copying itself will often have very large influences on the organism's phenotype as well.

If I take a book, copy it, and then print a new book which contains two copies of the old book (but nothing else), the new book doesn't contain any information that the old book doesn't; you won't gain anything extra by reading it that you wouldn't get by reading the old book.

False analogy. Books do not alter their own text with subsequent generations, or have constraints the are released by the copying.

But that takes thousands of generations.

It can take MUCH less than that.

Plenty of aircraft from fifty years ago are still in use; how many birds have lifespans of > 50 years?

A very large number. There are a lot of organisms that are more durable than that, for that matter. Sea Turtles, who's lifetime travels in a far more mechanically stressful environment will live many many decades.

I really don't think this should be surprising; evolution is limited to adding a small number of bits per generation, and has an upper bound on total information content per organism (cite), while humans have neither of these limitations.

Put it this way. We have engineered computer systems, because we can do it from the ground up from first principles. We do not yet know everything, or even a significant amount, of what is going on in a single well studied bacterium.

This is an obvious fallacy; nowhere is it written that a creation must be stupider than its creator. Evolution has no intelligence at all, and it created us. More recently, none of the humans who wrote Deep Blue could play chess anywhere near as well as it could.

Deep Blue had to be taught how to play chess by someone who was good at chess, who knew the rules and understood chess. The computer can perform more calculations per second to determine which move to make faster than a person can, and can process more information. However the computer cannot be programmed to use math that the programmer himself does not know.

Your analogy to evolution is completely false. Evolution does not program. It iterates. Every individual, generation after generation. The two processes are completely different.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the amount of information contained in the genes, which is what I was talking about originally. If you have a book, and create another copy of the book and stick it to the first, it doesn't matter how much you slice and dice and scramble the pages- you're not adding any new information that wasn't there before.

Raw information content is a very very poor proxy for complexity. Once you get past single celled organisms, the complexity of their systems multiplies exponentially proportionate with the number of cells.

Living things can't just magically repair broken parts or adapt to viruses either. Before modern medicine, any serious injury or serious disease was likely to result in death. Animals, like computers, have limited self-repair abilities, but these abilities are limited, they can't fix everything or fix most serious problems.

And a machine cannot self repair to any meaningful extent. If I get a novel virus, I could well survive because I have a baseline level of defenses even if my B cells do not know how to manufacture antibodies for the virus. If I survive long enough, my immune system will figure out how to do so, and I will have long lasting resistance to that virus. Many of our genes, non-coding genetic elements etc are actually old viral insertions.

If your computer does not have its virus definitions up to date, your computer is fucked. It does not matter how many lines of code it possesses. See this as a case in point regarding the sheer awesomeness and magnitude of the complexity and versatility of living things.

Only because a). we're bipedal, which is very rare in the animal kingdom, so you don't have to constantly put stress on the limb in order to get food, and b). because we know how to repair broken arms with modern medicine. For most animals, if they break a limb they're just screwed. See eg. Ruffian.

I happen to be an ecologist. I see animals with amputated limbs, broken limbs etc all the damn time. They do just fine. In fact it is very care to come across an organism with no old injuries. If I were to ram a spike through a machine, will it keep functioning generally? No. Every time a water snake eats a catfish, the spines on that catfish pass harmlessly through vital organs and the body wall. The rest of the fish is digested, and the spines drop out. The snake is no worse for wear.

[Korvan]

If you're going to be comparing a computer program to genetic code, you can't account for complexity by just counting the "lines of code". Let's say you're a software engineer and a new project just landed in your lap(top). It's a program that you have to analyze and ultimately modify. You have access to the source code, but the source is all written in binary and there's no documentation to go with it.

One problem is that the program won't run on your operating system, but not to worry as it includes its own operating system. Or rather it includes instructions on how to construct the operating system. Those instructions, of course, won't run under your operating system, but lets say you got your hands on a "seed" program that will start everything off for you.

It's a pretty big program split into 23 files. Each file is twice as large as it should be as it contains an additional copy of its code, written backwards for some reason. Major systems can sometimes be found all in one file, but are often split up between two or more files. The program, operating system and data are all mixed in together in this filing system. Liberal use of goto statements is pretty much the way of things here. There are no comments, no headers and there are large chunks of non-functioning code left over from previous versions. Non-functioning as in there are no references to these sections, but a single misplaced goto could result in them starting up. The result, pretty much something bad.

This program likes to make instances of itself and does so by coping itself in its entirety (including the operating system). The resulting instance can then self-modify to become specialized. Specialized instances work with other copies of themselves and other specialized instances to create major systems.

The code itself is beyond spaghetti-code and any change in one section can have unforeseen and unintended results in completely unrelated systems. The good news is most errors will result in a hard-crash during bootup, so it's easy and quick to see that something went wrong (not so easy to figure out what went wrong though). But some errors may only show up years later, and only during certain conditions. The operating system also includes an error-correction system that you will likely have to fight to prevent your changes from being undone.

You can basically take the world's worst legacy coding nightmare, and it will be nothing compared to the mess that is the human (any pretty much any other multi-cellular lifeform) genome. I'm sure there's lots of problems with my above analogy, but I hope it sort of gets across the point of what we're dealing with.

[Starglider]

Briefly, you can't directly compare the information content of source code vs genomes because genomes are quite highly compressed, both in low-level coding terms and against complexity in the environment. On the minus side biological DNA is cluttered with junk, repetition, noise and general inefficiency, but on balance I think it's still a couple of orders of magnitude ahead of typical source code. Of course it's also an apples-to-oranges comparison comparing a complete description of a functional system (Linux source) to a tiny seed system that will emerge into something close to a general configuration given time and the right environmental conditions (human embryo). We can of course simulate natural selection and associated evolutionary processes (including various sorts of expression network) using computers, and the resulting code does indeed look a lot more like DNA (messy, overloaded, robust, keyed to specific environmental features etc). Deliberative programming is a case of intelligent design and as such a totally opposite way to generate adaptive system features. Intelligent design is vastly more efficient than evolution in terms of optimisation performance for a given amount of compute power, but also vastly harder to implement (essentially a chicken-and-egg problem, which leads to the seed AI argument, which leads to questions about the shape of the cognitive effort vs improvement curve... which to a significant degree can only be answered by doing experiments with AI code).

Incidentally the argument about organisms being magically robust is specious. We don't tend to build machines to be redundant because it's more expensive. We certainly can do so though; you can literally drill into the case of a high end IBM/HP/etc server anywhere you like and it will keep running without a hiccup, because everything is duplicated, failover and hot-swappable. We can also make machines physically many orders of magnitude more resistant than organisms, to any environmental hazard you can name. Of course physical self-repair is going to require a lot more technological progress.

[Bottlestein]

Of course physical self-repair is going to require a lot more technological progress.

It's not a question of technological progress - we can have machines with "physical self repair" now. It's the energy consumption / entropy generation balance of said machines, which is strictly bounded above by physical laws (specifically statistical mechanics laws). "Nanotech" does not change this.

[Starglider]

It's not a question of technological progress - we can have machines with "physical self repair" now. It's the energy consumption / entropy generation balance of said machines, which is strictly bounded above by physical laws (specifically statistical mechanics laws). "Nanotech" does not change this.

That makes no sense, as both machines and organisms can and do have an indefinite amount of external energy and resources supplied. Thermodynamic arguments are really only relevant to 'grey goo', where it is indeed necessary to make a thermodynamic case for why the proposed self-replicators will substantially outperform bacteria. Not that I think that making such a case is particularly difficult, but I leave that to those appropriately qualified (chemists, preferably nanostructures experts).