From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Tue May 14 2002 - 16:12:39 MDT
The June, 2002 issue of Wired magazine (with Stephen Spielberg
on the cover) has a couple of items of interest to extropians.
On page 95, we have "Question: Has the evolution of H. sapiens
stopped?" with answers from Gregory Stock, Daniel Dennett and Brian
Atkins, identified as President, Singularity Institute for Artificial
Intelligence. All agree that humans are taking over their own
evolutionary process.
On the same page is a rather trite story about uploading, ending
with the tired joke of having the upload system crash dramatically.
It was running on Windows, get it? Har, har. But the redeeming point
is that the story begins with a quote from Eliezer Yudkowsky's essay
"Staring into the Singularity", which defines uploading and describes
what Eliezer calls the Moravec Transfer.
The same issue includes an excellent article on Stephen Wolfram and his
new book, "A New Kind of Science". The reviewer is Stephen Levy, who
is well known in technology circles. He interviewed me a few years ago
for his book on crypto and struck me as a really nice guy. The article
is colorful and gives a good feeling for what Wolfram and his book are
all about. Here's an excerpt:
"Wolfram is not satisfied with simply explaining and justifying his
contentions, but instead makes substantial efforts to apply his insights
to dozens of fields. 'What's basically happened is that I had this
idea of how to use simple programs to understand things about nature,
the universe, other stuff,' he says. 'And you can start looking at
questions that have been around forever, and you really get somewhere."
He invariably introduces each topic in a similar fashion: Curious
to know about _______ [choose any scientific discipline] and how his
new theories might apply, he decides to take a look at the history of
the field. Amazingly, he concludes, for hundreds of years so-called
experts have failed to answer key questions that should have been easily
resolved centuries ago. (Wolfram's disappointment in his predecessors
is bottomless.) But when Wolfram applies the ideas from A New Kind
of Science, he begins making progress and expresses the hunch that not
long after his ideas are understood, the biggest problems will quickly
be resolved, transforming the field.
"To list only a few examples: Wolfram finds an exception to the second
law of thermodynamics; conjectures why extraterrestrials might be
communicating with us in messages we can't perceive; explains seeming
randomness in financial markets; elaborates on why the 'apparent
freedom of human will' is so convincing; reconstructs the foundations
of mathematics; devises a new way to perform encryption; insists that
Darwinian natural selection is an overrated component in evolution; and,
oh, theorizes that there's a 'definite ultimate model for the universe.'"
One thing I [Hal] will add is that, while this list sounds amusingly
arrogant at first glance, in fact almost all of these ideas are familiar
concepts which other people have already put forth. An ultimate model
for the universe is scientific orthodoxy; downplaying Darwinian evolution
has been Gould's focus for years; CA based encryption systems have been
around for quite a while; and so on. We ourselves have often debated
the prospect of being surrounded by undetected extraterrestrial messages
indistinguishable from noise.
If you're thinking about buying his book you might want to pick up
this issue at the newstand and glance at Levy's article to give you
a clearer idea of what the book is like.
Hal
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