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Or it would be if they made tin-foil anymore. Hmm... I bet the reptoids, who control the Illuminati via the Council of Five, stopped world-wide production when it was discovered how efficacious tin was at stopping the brain beams...
But I digress.
One science report claims that thought-reading machines may not be too far off.
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.
The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.
My first thought? Puh-leaze.
I'm sure this is either case of wild optimism from the scientists, shoddy reporting from the Guardian (not the Guardian!), or a combination of both. In this case I'm going with a reporter that doesn't quite understand what he was told. If you really read the article, most of the fine grained "reading" seems to be with machines that have been specifically tuned to a specific brain. I doubt they can ever tune a machine with general rules and still be able to pull any meaningful information out a random population.
There is more application as a diagnostic tool. Or as a device to facilitate mind-machine interfaces such as those being developed for artificial limbs. And, as with any new tool, there will be ethical concerns to be dealt with. The sheer invasiveness of such a device would be one such concern. But the subtext of the article appears to be some kind of general thought reading machine that can predict crime is just over the horizon. And I'm at a loss as to how the reporter could reach this conclusion.
Well, not really. I'm sure that part of it he understood, part of it he didn't, and some of it he extrapolated using movie-science (i.e. nonsense).
A study that is able to predict a subject's choice of adding or subtracting two numbers is a far cry from being able to read intentions in general. What this study says is that they can read the intentions of someone in a rigidly defined situation with only two possible outcomes, and I'm guessing only after extensively tuning the machine to each individual's particular brain.
This is way too specific a technique for any kind of general crime-prevention tool. Not only does it need to be tuned, they have to know what exactly they are looking for. And I'm betting while it may never be impossible, it seems it would be so highly improbable that it may as well be considered impossible.
There is no "alphabet of the synapses" where they can observe a person's synaptic activity and look up what it means in some lexicon. Because no one person's brain works exactly like another's. A large part of this is because there's a mini-evolutionary war that occurs when your nervous system is developing. Proto nerves are in competition to become either synapses or glial cells. Due to the trillions of cells involved, no one brain develops in quite the same way as any other.
Just as it is in our macro level ecosystems, so it is in your brain. Nature does not use the ideal model for a situation. It uses the first model that survives. The one that is "good enough". Take the human eye. It most definitely is not the ideal model for an organ that processes the visual spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Hell, there's a blind spot right in the center of our vision where the optic nerve enters the orb. But it's good enough (and the binocular aspect of our visual field helps compensate). It has contributed to our survival and perpetuation as a species, therefore there is no longer environmental pressure to find a better ocular organ. But you can bet your ass if that little spot caused problems, it would have been bred out of existence long before we developed these big brains of ours.
Now, due to our DNA, every brain has the same essential starting blueprint and overall structure. But there are pressures at work as well and the brain is, essentially, a closed environment. Think of the brain as a ecosystem with trillions of little denizens. It is constantly searching for ways to accomplish tasks "well enough". If a certain pattern of firings or cell configurations produces a desired result that pattern will be used again. And again. Until is becomes more-or-less "hard wired". There is no optimization involved. The result is what matters, not the method used to get that result.
What I'm getting to is that different people end up with different thought patterns and physical structures. To be sure, the meta-functions may be located in the same generalized areas of the brain. Language in Broca's Area, sight in the Visual Cortex. But the specific instantiations and pathways of thought are most likely unique for each person.
And to top it all off, how fine a resolution does this machine have. Say there a million synapses firing in a specific sequence are involved in making the decision to murder someone. Now, what if these same million synapses fire in the same sequence but have been appended by, say, 25 other synapses, and prepended by another 10 or so. But now this represents the intention to buy a cup of coffee. Can this hypothetical machine detect a .0025% delta in brain activity that represents two wildly different intentions?
Of course all this could be moot anyway, depending on whether the brain is deterministic in nature or not. If it is, then perhaps, with the correct tuning for an individual, this could be used as a sort of general "reading" device. But I doubt it could ever be used as a Minority Report style pre-crime detector.
And if the brain operates on a quantum level, then all bets are off. Will the subject be aware of observation or not? Will the observers be aware of what they are observing? Will the quantum states of the observers brains affect the states of the observed? Quantum mechanics tells us yes. If the brain exists as a set of potentials and probabilities, true observation of the brain at a level that the article alludes to will be as impossible as trying to simultaneously measure an electron's position and angular momentum (can't be done).
Basically, is the act of thinking about how I think, somehow, at some level, altering how I think at that particular time?
Shit like this keeps me up at night.
So what do I think (heh) of this? I think the best that will come out of this, in terms of law enforcement, is an extremely accurate lie-detector. Lying is more or less understood in terms of gross brain activity for most people. Pathologic liars and others with sociopathic tendencies will still slip the net. But it will be much better than this bio-feedback voodoo that's in use now.
But reading intentions and specific thoughts? Very, very doubtful.
The elusive Methuselah gene? Perhaps not, but glimpses into preventing senility.Nothing scares me more than the thought of losing my ability to reason. Hopefully by the time it becomes an issue, it won't be an issue any longer.
This is a pretty interesting article about robotics, intelligence and inherent rights.
Robots and machines are now classed as inanimate objects without rights or duties but if artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, the report argues, there may be calls for humans’ rights to be extended to them.
It seems they think around 2056 we will have seen the birth of self aware synthetic intelligence. While their report raises some tricky ethical and moral questions, I have to wonder just how optimistic they are being with their estimates. Remember, we were supposed to have conquered this realm by now.
I suppose I cannot fault them for their predictions (and looking past those predictions to the impact on society). There is a school of thought that intelligence is emergent. That is, interactions between simple mechanisms become more and more complex as the scale increases. At some threshold of scale, the level of complex behavior appears to self organize and produce resultant interactions that cannot be predicted by extrapolating the behavior of its fundamental parts. Typically, this is called Strong Emergence (it's hard to see how Weak Emergence could give rise to intelligence). And as we can all testify, our computers, phones, entertainment systems are becoming more and more complex every day. So there is something to be said for this becoming a possibility due to the seemingly geometric increases we see happening.
Materialists (in the most broad sense) say our brains are purely algorithmic in nature and the mind is simply an artifact of an extremely complex machine. Forget free will. There is no such thing here. Everything is ruled by stimulus/response. Even our innermost thoughts. Hell, even this little essay has been determined by past experience and external stimulus. And every word could have been accurately predicted given a complete mathematical model of my brain.
This is called Biological Naturalism. At its core, it's a rejection of the duality of the mind and body. Given a sufficiently complex model a simulation will in essence no longer be a model but an independent, self-aware consciousness. Of course, the creation of this kind of system would make accurate weather modeling (still out of our grasp) seem simple by comparison. In essence we would be building a brain.
There's another idea in the materialist camp. That the form is much more complex than we can ever hope to understand. That intelligence is intrinsically wedded to quantum mechanics. Roger Penrose goes on about this in some of his writings. With a clever application of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and the halting problem (knowing when a series of equations is infinite or unsolvable), he posits that while consciousness ultimately arises due to structure, it is beyond what we will ever be able to deduce due to the fact that we can never have a complete and consistant model. The ability to understand, much less create, self-awareness will forever be out of reach thanks to Gödel. This idea is very controversial and I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole. Plus the math is way beyond me (and I'm talking many light-years beyond).
I'm going to touch on simulation in this case. Barring any major breakthroughs in nueroscience, our understanding of chaos, and fast analog, multi-state computers (or quantum computers), simulations will most likely be pale imitations of homo sapiens sapiens.
But, if a simulation is convincing enough to pass a Turing Test, we start moving out of the shallows of epistemology and into the deep scary waters of existentialism. Here, we question the validity of robotic rights. Would the concept even apply for pure simulations? Or would we be using these simulated beings as a mirror, trying to put limits and restrictions on our seemingly inherent brutality and callousness?
These are questions that will most likely never be answered. Nor should they, really. It is the searching --the blind groping --that make it worthwhile. It's what we trip over and discover, in our own ineffable, blundering way, while trying to answer the unanswerable. What we discover there --those are the real treasures of humanity.
However, there are greater, more pressing questions that we should begin to ask ourselves before it becomes moot. How will we relate to a created intelligence? What common ground can we have, given the wildly different environments?
And even more fundamental: Would we even be able to recognize the existence of an intelligence that would be so completely different from our own?
Well, at least we in the US aren't the only ones who overreact due to shoddy science.
David Dean, 43, a councillor in Merton, South London, and the managing director of a publishing company, describes himself as a human antenna. “The moment I go into people’s houses I know whether they have wi-fi because my head starts to buzz. I had to leave my last job because I couldn’t stand up for more than ten minutes in the office and my boss would not remove the wi-fi. My heart raced, I had double vision and really bad headaches. It felt as though my head was in an arm lock. Twice I have been into homes where the children were screaming monsters. After I suggested to the parents that they turn off the network for two days, the kids were transformed.”
Oh, and how about the guy with the lobbying group trying to stir up fear about the so-called effect of WiFi radio signals. Please disregard the fact that he "runs a company selling electromagnetic radiation detectors and blockers."
But wait, you say, what about evidence from the other side?
Dr Michael Clark, of the HPA, says published research on mobile phones and masts does not add up to an indictment of wi-fi. “All the expert reviews done here and abroad indicate that there is unlikely to be a health risk from wireless networks,” he says. “The few studies on mobile phone masts that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals claiming to observe health effects are not at all conclusive. The real problem is deciding what level of precaution is appropriate.
“When we have conducted measurements in schools, typical exposures from wi-fi are around 20 millionths of the international guideline levels of exposure to radiation. As a comparison, a child on a mobile phone receives up to 50 per cent of guideline levels. So a year sitting in a classroom near a wireless network is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes on a mobile. If wi-fi should be taken out of schools, then the mobile phone network should be shut down, too — and FM radio and TV, as the strength of their signals is similar to that from wi-fi in classrooms.”
Sorry Dr. Clark, anecdotal evidence always trumps facts and figures. Especially when we need to do it for the children.
Idiots.
I am sure everyone has heard about the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning. Apparently, he was poisoned with Polonium-210. He ended up dying a relatively painful death as a result.
Everyone agrees that there is no way this could have happened by accident. From the Wikipedia article regarding the poisoning:
Polonium-210 - 210Po - is exceedingly rare in nature, and must be artificially manufactured using radioactive bombardment in, for example, a specialised nuclear reactor. British and US government sources have both indicated the use of 210Po as a poison has never been documented before, and this is probably the first time anyone has been tested for the presence of polonium-210 in their body. Andrea Sella, lecturer in chemistry at University College London, has pointed out that: "This is not the sort of thing that amateurs could have cooked up in a bathtub. You would have to go to a nuclear lab."
The number one suspect is, of course, Russia. Litvinenko had been recently investigating the very suspiscious murder of Anna Politkovskaya, in whose death Russia (in particular Putin's administration) is also suspected to be involved. In addition, he was a very outspoken critic of Putin. The current, most popular theory is that Putin, or one of his cronies, ordered his death. The difficulty in obtaining and/or creating 210Po is cited as part of the reasoning behind this theory. It is claimed that of all the parties interested in his death (as far as I know, Russia is the only one interested), only Russia has the means and motive for this murder. And really, how hard is it to find opportunity in a large metropolitan city like London?
While I am convinced Russia is ultimately responsible, the means part of this equation may need to be reevaluated.
The radioactive material that killed a former Russian spy in Britain can be bought on the Internet for $69.
Polonium-210, which experts say is many times more deadly than cyanide, can be bought legally through United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order company that sells through the Web. Chemical companies sell the Polonium-210 legally for industrial use such as removing static electricity from machinery. United Nuclear claims that the material is "currently the only legal Alpha source available without a license."
I'm heading over to their site and see what other cool shit I can order.
If you want to geek out, engineer style, read this article about a very cool nail. Yes, a nail.
Sutt’s bosses at Bostitch must be happy too. The company is selling every HurriQuake nail it produces and has been doubling production capacity every month. Although the nail is currently available only in the Gulf region (it adds about $15 to the cost of an average 2,000-square-foot house), the company is adding new production lines to meet nationwide demand. Meanwhile, the nail is getting rave reviews from building-technology experts.
Here we go again...
Proponents of "intelligent design" in the United States are waging a war against teaching science as scientists understand it. Over the past year alone, efforts to incorporate creationist language or undermine evolution in science classrooms at public schools have emerged in at least 15 states, according to the National Center for Science Education. And an independent education foundation has concluded that science-teaching standards in 10 states fail to address evolution in a scientifically sound way. Through changes in standards and curriculum, these efforts urge students to doubt evolution -- the cornerstone principle of biology, one on which there is no serious scientific debate.
Repeat after me: Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. It belongs in a comparative religion or philosophy class. ID relies on an axiom that is fundamentally untestable. No test can be designed to prove or disprove the existence of a Primal Cause, be it God or ET. Beyond the heavens opening up with angelic choir, or a visit from an alien (they better have damn good lab notes to back up their claims), ID is an unsupportable hypothesis from a scientific standpoint.
This is not a war of religion against science. The two have thrived together for centuries. Nor is it a struggle of believers against godless materialists; many believers practice science and find inspiration for it from their faith. It is a battle between religious dogma cloaked as science and open inquiry that leads to new knowledge and understanding of the natural world.
The notion of intelligent design is clever; it has a certain philosophical appeal. The evolution of a human eye from a series of random mutations, for example, is indeed difficult to understand; the notion of an intelligent creator solves such problems, and feeds our spiritual needs. But it distracts us from learning what is scientifically testable and reduces students' will to probe the natural world.
Oh, for Christ's sake! That lame "the eyeball could not possibly be a result of evolution" argument. Of all the arguments these... alternative scientists could make, this one is the stupidest. No engineer would ever design a light sensitive organ with the structure of the eyeball (except for maybe an octopus eye -- that one is pretty damn cool). Hell, there's a blind spot smack dab in the middle of our field of vision. That's because the optic nerve is attached on the inside of the eye as opposed to the back. The eyeball is a poorly designed organ, but its structure makes perfect sense if you look at it as an organ that has evolved from a cluster of light sensitive neurons. Difficult to understand does not mean impossible to understand. Well, perhaps in the IDers case it is impossible to understand, since a foundation of basic biological science, which they seem unwilling to acknowledge, is necessary.
If the US wants to remain competitive in the world of pharmacology, medicine, genetics, --hell, anything related to biology, we need to stop producing scientific imbeciles in this country. Trying to inject Intelligent Design (which is Creationism playing dress-up) into a science class or downplaying the importance of evolution in biology class is ignorant and irresponsible.
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