[p2p-research] Shiny Robot Bodies, Sentient Devices, “Immortality Pills”, Immersive Holodec...

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Shiny Robot Bodies, Sentient
Devices, “Immortality Pills”, Immersive Holodecks, Desktop
Nanofactories, Etc. via Accelerating Future by Michael Anissimov on
5/3/10

My recent post on how the popular zeitgeist has already embraced
transhumanism provoked responses from transhumanist Guilio Prisco and
anti-transhumanist Dale Carrico, a lecturer at UC Berkeley. Carrico
writes:

In something of a surprise move, Singularitarian Transhumanist Robot
Cultist Michael Anissimov has declared victory. Apparently, the
superlative futurologists have “won.” The Robot Cult, it would seem,
has prevailed over the ends of the earth.

Usually, when palpable losers declare victory in this manner, the
declaration is followed by an exit, either graceful or grumbling, from
the stage. But I suspect we will not be so lucky when it comes to
Anissimov and his fellow victorious would-be
techno-transcendentalizers.

Neither can we expect them “to take their toys and go home,” as is
usual in such scenes. After all, none of their toys — none of their
shiny robot bodies, none of their sentient devices, none of their
immortality pills, none of their immersive holodecks, none of their
desktop nanofactories, none of their utility fogs, none of their comic
book body or brain enhancement packages, none of their kindly or
vengeful superintelligent postbiological Robot Gods — none of them
exist now for them to go home with any more than they ever did, they
exist only as they always have done, as wish-fulfillment fancies in
their own minds.

Breaking it down, all these “toys” sound great. Desktop nanofactories,
especially, in the right hands, could totally decentralize
manufacturing and make it much easier for the world’s poorest people to
gain some measure of material wealth and security.

I’d like to address some of the technologies Dale mentions, because I
believe they are worthy goals and that intermediary steps to these
goals are incredibly beneficial themselves.

To start with “robot bodies”, there are no robot bodies suitable for
human occupation today, but there are exoskeletons. For instance, Japan
is developing a “Power Assist Suit”, which will retail at $10,000 USD,
to help elderly farmers in rural regions. If you want to ask how
transhumanist-flavored thinking can distinguish a society, look no
further than Japan. Japan is also working on developing brain-computer
interfaces with cooperation from corporate giants like Toyota, Honda
and Hitachi. There’s a reason why these initiatives are happening in
Japan. Japan’s culture is extremely future-friendly and open-minded to
transhumanistic visions, which include robotic exoskeletons and
brain-computer interfaces.

As for “sentient devices”, many of my readers no doubt own iPhones or
Android-powered startphones and use their many useful features on a
daily basis, including a variety of applications. This is not like
having Einstein in your pocket, but it is certainly an improvement on
what we had before. The improvement in sophistication of mobile devices
in the last few years is nothing less than remarkable.

Regarding “immortality pills”, it makes great sense to look for
compounds which have the potential to break up toxic accumulations of
molecular junk in the body. That is what Geron and the SENS Foundation
are doing, for instance. The Methuselah Foundation, while not working
on “immortality pills”, has created excellent prizes for mouse
rejuvenation and organ printing. These organizations are fueled by the
kind of “superlative thinking” that characterizes transhumanism and
which is criticized not only by outright anti-transhumanists like
Carrico but also insiders like IEET Managing Director Mike Treder.

As for immersive holodecks, I see few other things with the potential
to improve our civilizational resilience and save travel money.
Companies like Microvision are developing innovative heads-up displays,
projectors, and glasses to help bring virtuality into the real world.
The computational requirements needed to smoothly update a virtual
scene as someone quickly moves their head around to observe it are
formidable, but we are moving closer to this milestone. Ray Kurzweil
predicts that immersive VR will be the hip thing in the 2020s. I’ve
previously argued that full-body haptic feedback suits would be
necessary to truly experience immersive VR, and I predicted that such a
suit would be developed by 2020. I still stand by that prediction — in
fact, it could be sooner. Companies have already developed vests that
can simulate hugging or combat. Guess where the hug vest was developed?
Japan.

Desktop nanofactories, to me, seem more important and relevant than all
the technologies listed above. Why? They would vastly accelerate
progress towards all the above, probably so much so that it would
actually be a threat to the stability of society. Instead of desktop
nanofactories, today we have the explosion of 3D printing, which I
follow closely and with great enthusiasm. Each week I wonder what the
fabbing community will come up with next. Blogs like Fabbaloo chronicle
progress in the field. Groups like open source ecology take it to the
next level, making the open source fab lab a central feature of their
effort. The success of open source ecology is a testimony to the power
of desktop manufacturing units. As these manufacturing devices are
improved, they will be able to fabricate an increasingly larger array
of products. Their spatial resolution today is about 1 mm, but
eventually that will drop to microns and eventually nanometers.

To manufacture true utility fog would require nanofactories, and a
number of technological obstacles still remain between today’s
nanotechnology and the routine synthesis of rigid microscale or
macroscale objects from atomic components. Instead, we have Intel and
Carnegie Mellon working on “poor man’s utility fog”. It could even be
possible to manufacture early-stage catoms (the “atoms” of a
claytronics setup”) with current nanoscale manufacturing technologies.

In conclusion, even though the technologies that Dale lists don’t exist
yet, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep working towards them, or
that the intermediaries won’t be incredibly useful. The vision of
far-future possibilities is what inspires some of the projects above to
grind forward on a daily basis.

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